V 


C  hamcleon 

H|Being  the  BooK  of  My  Selves 


am  in 


sseres 


Ll  EBEf\&  LEWIS        NEW-YORK 


COPYRIGHT,  1922, 
BY  LIEBER  &  LEWIS 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


TO  BIO 


These  essays  have  appeared  (1903-1915) 
in  the  New  York  Sun,  the  Philistine,  Mind, 
Reedy's  Mirror,  the  Critic,  Liberty,  Moods 
and  Wiltshire's  Magazine.  Thanks  are  here 
by  extended  for  permission  to  reprint  them. 


CONTENTS 


The  Brain  and  the  World     ....  7 

The  Mirth  of  the  Brain 13 

Wonder 20 

The  Almightiness  of  Might     ....  31 

The   Intangible   Life 39 

The  Irony  of  Negatives 51 

History 63 

The  Passion  of  Distance 75 

The  Comic  View 82 

The  Artist 89 

Under  a  Mask 99 

A  Memorable  Escape 106 

The  Masquerade 117 

Respectability 124 

The  Impenitent 131 

The  Eternal  Renaissance 146 

Silence 154 

Posterity:    The  New  Superstition  .     .  163 

An  Evaporating  Universe     ....  170 

The  Trail  of  the  Worm 180 

Cosmic  Marionettes 188 

The  Drama  of  Days 194 

Absorption:  A  Universal  Law  .     .     .199 

Acatalepsy '.     .  208 

Coda 215 


THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD 

WE  never  come  into  contact  with 
things,  but  only  with  their  images. 
We    never    know   the    real — only 
effigies   of   the   real.    We   do   not   pursue 
objects;  we  pursue  the  reflection  of  objects. 
We  do  not  possess  things;  we  possess  the 
emotions  that  things  inspire. 

If  I  pluck  a  flower  and  hold  it  in  my 
hand  I  have  merely  come  into  contact  with 
an  image  in  my  brain  created  by  certain 
complex  influences  transmitted  through  the 
senses  from  an  unknowable.  No  one  pur 
sues  power  or  wealth;  he  pursues  ideas  and 
images  of  power  and  wealth.  Strictly 
speaking,  I  do  not  live  in  a  house,  in  the 
air,  but  live  in  my  house-image,  my  air- 
image.  Images  and  thoughts  being  the 
very  pulp  of  consciousness,  it  follows  that 
in  images  and  thoughts  there  lies  the  only 
reality  we  can  ever  know.  Imagination 
and  its  elements  are  not  the  effigies  of 
matter,  but  what  we  term  matter  is  the 
(7) 


8  THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD 

effigy  of  our  images.  Hence  the  imaginary 
world — the  world  of  intellect  and  images — 
is  the  only  real  world.  It  is  the  unanalyz- 
able  data  of  consciousness. 

We  never  get  over  the  threshold  of  our 
images.  We  live  in  images  whether  in  rest 
or  motion.  Illusion  does  not  consist  in  be 
lieving  our  images  and  dreams  to  be  real, 
but  in  believing  that  there  exists  anything 
else  but  images  and  dreams.  The  illusions 
of  the  brain  are  the  only  realities;  they 
become  delusions  when  we  try  to  ex 
ternalize  them.  All  practical  men  are 
insane  because  they  seek  to  externalize  the 
internal.  All  poets  and  philosophers  are 
sane  because  they  seek  to  internalize  the 
external. 

Idolatry  is  the  worship  of  the  non 
existent.  All  practical  life  is  founded  on 
the  belief  that  there  is  something  to  be 
had  outside  of  the  self,  that  there  is  a 
pleasure  to  be  had  in  things  per  se,  that 
Mecca  is  a  place,  not  a  belief.  Matter  is 
something  fashioned  by  the  brain,  an  eidolon 
of  the  will,  the  symbol  of  an  image.  The 
practical  person  tries  to  grasp  the  symbol; 
the  poet  tries  to  grasp  the  image.  The 
former  must  always  fail  because  we  never 


THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD  9 

come  into  contact  with  matter,  which  is 
the  symbol  of  ideas;  no  mind  ever  comes 
into  contact  with  the  external  world.  The 
latter  (the  poet)  always  succeeds  because 
he  arrays  himself  in  himself;  lives  imme 
diately  in  the  thought,  image  or  emotion 
that  a  thing  creates;  he  knows  that  the 
materialization  of  an  image  is  the  substi 
tution  of  a  symbol  for  a  reality. 

The  sense  of  universal  disillusion,  of  the 
almost  total  absence  of  relation  between 
dream  and  deed,  is  the  ever-recurring  proof 
of  the  egocentricity  of  man.  He  is  the 
sun  around  which  swing  and  dance  the 
worlds  tossed  off  through  immeasurable 
time;  worlds  so  seeming  real,  but  which  are 
mere  spawn  of  dreams,  man's  chance-litter. 
To  stretch  out  the  hand  from  the  House 
of  Images  seeking  to  grasp  this  domed  and 
pinnacled  mirage  is  the  signal  that  wakes 
the  imps  of  irony  from  their  subterranean 
vaults  and  sends  them  swarming  and  gib 
bering  over  the  roofs  and  through  the 
streets  of  that  image-chrismed  city,  now 
suddenly  become  a  deserted  city  of  rotted 
rookeries. 

The  eternal  legend  of  the  Brain  and  the 
World,  of  the  Image  and  the  Mirage  is 


10          THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD 

found  in  all  ages — in  the  fables  of  Tantalus 
and  Ixion,  in  the  world-wisdom  of  Don 
Quixote  and  Faust,  in  "El  Magico  Pro- 
digioso"  of  Calderon,  in  the  Dhamapada, 
in  the  Ibsen  plays.  The  legerdemain  of 
the  senses  it  is  that  scratches  those  lines  of 
sorrow  at  mouth-ends,  draws  heavy  blank 
curtains  over  the  wild  scenery  of  the  eye, 
sets  a  flag  of  truce  on  the  purposeful  brow 
and  sends  us  to  cower  behind  the  breast 
works  of  an  eternal  reticence. 

Men  sail  the  seas  for  adventure,  travel 
towards  the  poles  for  the  novel  and  seek  in 
remote  lands  the  tang  of  the  strange,  the 
witchery  of  the  weird;  but  the  adventure, 
the  novelty,  the  tang  and  the  witchery  are 
in  men  themselves.  I  am  my  own  novelty, 
my  own  adventure;  it  is  I  who  give  tang 
to  life.  I  am  bewitched  of  wonder  and  mys 
tery — than  me  there  is  nothing  more  weird 
that  is  conceivable.  He  who  goes  a-seeking 
leaves  himself  behind.  Other  than  your 
soul  there  is  no  reality.  We  can  go  toward 
nothing  unless  that  thing  has  first  come 
toward  us.  The  brain  is  not  only  the  center 
of  gravity,  but  is  gravity.  The  Will  is  not 
only  the  inventor  of  the  universe,  but  is 
the  universe. 


THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD          11 

We  go  toward  ourselves.  My  images 
and  dreams  and  thoughts  are  eggs.  I 
enwomb  and  unwomb  myself.  I  have  in 
finities,  eternities,  nadirs,  zeniths  boxed  in 
my  brain.  I  am  always  delivering  myself 
to  myself,  cannot  forsake  myself,  cannot 
possibly  exist  in  the  world — seeing  that  the 
world  exists  in  me. 

The  world  began  with  mind;  before  that 
it  was  only  a  possibility.  The  brain  is  the 
radiant  hub  of  the  universal  illusion.  We 
have  exiled  the  stars  in  their  spaces  and 
imprisoned  light  in  its  wall-less  tombs  of 
air.  Pole  star  and  the  frozen  mountains 
of  the  moon  are  the  mere  flotsam  and  jetsam 
of  our  evolved  and  highly  elaborated  imag 
ining.  All — all  is  only  the  balustrade  of 
the  mind,  out  on  the  furthest  portals  of 
which  this  mysteriously  appeared  I  peers 
for  all  its  days  at  the  image-children  that 
it  has  flung  off  in  its  incalculable  evolutions. 

This  ethereal  upstart  with  the  brazen 
acclaim,  this  image-haunted  mystery  that 
we  name  Man,  who,  after  all,  is  but  a 
slight  excess  of  Nothing  and  yet  the  meas 
ure  of  all,  a  drop  of  blazing  oil  that  has 
bubbled  out  of  a  beaker  of  flame  in  the 
hands  of  a  Something — what  does  he  know? 


12          THE  BRAIN  AND  THE  WORLD 

There  are  the  image  and  the  imagined, 
the  Brain  and  the  World,  the  Eternal 
Ghost  fabricating  its  world-shrouds. 


THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN 

WHY  is  there  laughter  in  an 
existence  that  none  of  us  laughs 
at?  Why  is  there  mirth  in 
a  world  of  struggle  and  precarious 
chances?  We  come  into  life  with  a  scream 
of  agony  and  go  out  of  it  with  palms  ex 
tended,  signifying  nothing.  Proserpina  is 
the  goddess  of  death,  and  no  one  has  been 
found  stronger  than  she — except  it  be 
Momus,  the  god  of  laughter,  whom  Proser 
pina  cannot  slay. 

Laughter  is  no  accident.  It  is  something 
rooted  in  the  depths  of  our  being.  Pain 
is  deeper  than  all  thought;  laughter  is 
higher  than  all  pain.  Care  cudgels  us  with 
an  ebon  stave — but  look  above!  there  is 
Laughter — the  fairy  goddess  waving  a  sil 
ver-bright  wand. 

There  is  a  comic  spirit  in  things  as  well 

as  a  tragic  spirit.     The  gods  bowl  us  over 

and    still    we    make    merry.      Hurricane, 

earthquake,  war  and  fire  conspire  to  an- 

(13) 


14  THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN 

nihilate  us,  but  jocosity  and  joviality  flow 
in  an  unbroken  stream  from  the  springs  of 
buoyancy  set  deep  within  the  soul  of  man. 

Only  the  heart  suffers.  The  brain  is 
the  peaceful,  undisturbed,  eternal  spectator 
of  the  monstrous  paradox  called  Life.  The 
mind  never  worries,  is  never  perturbed,  is 
never  in  pain.  The  heart — that  great  lu- 
panar  of  desires — may  seduce  the  brain 
to  participate  in  its  earth-itches;  but  in  it 
self  the  mind  is  a  detached,  impersonal  ob 
server  of  the  great  tangled  web  of  passion 
and  error  that  is  spun  in  the  heart  of  man. 

Mind  as  mind  has  the  placidity  of  a  mir 
ror.  All  things  are  reflected  in  it,  but  for 
the  image  of  Lady  Macbeth  it  cares  no 
more  than  for  the  image  of  Falstaif. 

The  unconscious  universe  struggled  and 
fought  until  it  evolved  a  brain.  In  mind 
the  star  and  plant  rise  to  thought.  The 
World- Spirit  contemplates  itself  through 
the  brain  of  man.  It  is  the  light  born  of 
darkness.  Through  the  brain  nature  passes 
from  actor  to  observer,  from  blind,  eyeless 
combat  to  wide-eyed  intelligence,  from  an 
immemorial  pain  to  the  beginnings  of  an 
immemorial  mirth. 

Impersonal    contemplation — that    is    the 


THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN  15 

secret  of  laughter.  Mirth  is  as  old  as  the 
first  mind  that  detached  itself — even  for  a 
single  hour — from  the  service  of  the  emo 
tions  and  the  lower  nature  generally.  The 
first  man  who  said,  "I  will  retire  from  the 
combat  a  little  while  to  the  hill  to  watch 
the  fray"  was  the  first  man  who  laughed 
with  his  brain.  Distance,  aloofness,  height 
strike  out  by  a  magic  psychic  friction  the 
spark  that  bears  in  its  centre  the  germ  of 
philosophy.  Only  cosmic  comedians  be 
come  as  the  gods. 

The  elements  of  the  incongruous  and  ri 
diculous  run  through  all  the  affairs  of  men. 
The  intervention  of  the  unknown  at  each 
moment  in  their  affairs  and  schemes  whirls 
them  off  their  feet  and  elicits  from  Intellect 
the  same  gleeful  scream  that  children  give 
vent  to  in  a  circus  when  the  trapeze  per 
former  whirls  unexpectedly  through  the 
air.  With  the  significant  difference  that 
the  circus  acrobat  knows  where  he  is  going 
to  land,  but  the  acrobat  Man  in  this  great 
cosmic  circus  is  caught  unawares  and  lands 
where  Circumstance  forgot  to  spread  her 
nets. 

The  World- Spirit  is  a  freakish,  ironic 
spirit.  It  contrives  strange  outcomes  to  our 


16  THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN 

conscious  plans.  We  plan  and  plan  in  one 
spirit,  and  behold!  another  spirit  takes 
possession.  Dante's  Inferno,  written  in  a 
religious  fervor  as  an  exposition  of  theo 
logical  conception,  set  at  work  the  forces 
which  finally  overthrew  those  very  concep 
tions.  The  Inquisition,  instituted  to  fasten 
by  force  a  religious  creed  on  the  world, 
was  the  means  that  brought  about  the  final 
4-  annihilation  of  the  means.  Anarchy  spreads 
just  in  the  measure  that  you  persecute  it. 
The  means  employed  to  enslave  a  people 
are  the  very  means  that  awaken  the  pas 
sion  for  liberty  in  their  souls.  There 
is  no  surer  way  to  keep  forces  in  motion 
that  you  wish  to  annihilate  than  to  persist 
ently  struggle  against  them.  If  you  wish 
to  see  how  far  a  pendulum  will  swing  to 
the  right,  draw  it  to  the  extreme  left. 

This  is  the  Immanent  Mirth  in  things — 
the  quiet  laughter  of  the  hidden  Prestidigi- 
tateur;  the  exquisite  mockery  of  nature 
which  made  hilarious  the  days  of  Rabelais. 
Leisure  is  the  condition  of  the  growth 
of  the  smile  in  the  brain.  Laughter  comes 
with  contemplation.  A  man  may  take  joy 
in  his  work,  but  he  cannot  laugh  at  it. 
Mirth  is  a  kind  of  serene  scepticism.  It 


THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN  17 

comes  only  with  intelligence.  The  percep 
tion  that  life  is  something  of  a  joke  may 
possibly  come  to  a  boor  laboring  in  the 
fields,  but  it  clothes  itself  to  him  as  a  bitter 
jest,  for  his  brain  is  still  the  handmaiden 
of  his  stomach.  The  leisure  of  Mephisto- 
pheles,  the  intelligence  of  Lucifer — these 
must  be  approached  to  perceive  the  depth 
on  depth  of  world- jollity. 

Fanaticism,  the  man  with  the  fixed  idea — 
the  antithetical  mental  attitude  to  the  world- 
sceptic — is  incapable  of  cerebral  mirth.  The 
finest  minds  are  those  in  which  intelligence 
and  insight  spread  out  like  the  gradual 
opening  of  a  circular  fan.  They  come  to 
perceive  all  sides  in  one  glance.  They  are 
like  a  man  who  stands  at  the  north  pole — 
all  longitudes  centre  in  him;  he  sees  all 
the  imaginary  lines  that  men  map  and  num 
ber  and  believe  in.  He  is  conscious  for  the 
first  time  of  the  absurdity  of  direction;  he 
comes  to  know  in  a  flash  how  purely  arbi 
trary  are  affirmative  ideas  about  any 
thing. 

And  he  laughs  a  long  laugh  into  the 
skies. 

The  dominant  note  observable  in  Nature 
— observable  only  to  the  eye  of  the  mind 


18  THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN 

that  has  severed  itself  from  the  prejudices 
of  the  will — is  blitheness.  She  seems  al 
ways  to  be  laughing;  her  most  terrible  mo 
ments  are  like  the  scowls  that  elders  put 
on  in  front  of  naughty  children  who  really 
amuse  them — the  mocking  mask  of  mirth. 
Nature  goes  her  way  through  her  four 
seasons  with  a  carelessness,  an  insouciance, 
a  sangfroid  such  as  men  have  who  care 
nothing  for  death  or  who  have  learned  the 
fine  secret  that  the  tomb  covers  but  does 
not  hide.  Life  is  a  huge  joke  to  the  Im 
mortal  Mother.  She  laughs  eternally 
because  she  is  wiser  than  her  children.  She 
knows  nothing  is  lost.  She  knows  that 
death  is  recomposition  and  pain  is  the  way 
character  is  tooled. 

How  deep  was  Shakespeare's  mirth  when 
he  gave  us  Puck!  Puck,  the  lordly  imp  of 
a  topsy-turvy  universe;  Puck  who  is  the 
seer  par  excellence  of  the  world;  Puck  who 
put  a  girdle  of  laughter  around  the  universe ; 
Puck  who  smiled  and  smiled  and  was  not 
a  villain — only  a  divine  sportsman  who 
played  battledore  and  shuttlecock  with  us 
in  the  fields  of  Eternity. 

There  is  quenchless  grief  in  all  things — 
if  we  will  have  it  so.  Move  up  into  the 


THE  MIRTH  OF  THE  BRAIN  19 

higher  altitudes  and  the  grief  in  all  things 
turns  to  a  quenchless  mirth. 

The  higher  altitude  is  just  that  step  from 
the  heart  to  the  brain. 


WONDER 

TO  see,  one  must  close  the  eyes.  This 
is  the  paradox  of  insight — a  seeing 
into.  The  physical  world  is  nothing 
but  insulated  force.  It  is  only  the  mind's 
eye  that  can  pierce  the  arras  of  images  and 
behold  the  unimaginable. 

The  mystic  sense  is  a  form  of  vascular 
activity.  It  is  the  palpitant  ethereal  in  us, 
the  radio-activity  of  the  corpuscle.  In  the 
sluiceways  of  the  brain  it  rises  to  conscious 
ness. 

Our  brains  are  portable  universes,  and 
our  souls  are  unbirthed  worlds.  God 
created  the  material  world,  Bishop  Berkeley 
destroyed  it,  and  Herbert  Spencer  re 
created  it.  We  are  coequal  with  the  creat 
ive  gods.  Man  weaves  microcosm  into 
macrocosm,  bastes  the  ideal  to  the  real,  hems 
soul  to  body.  He  tracks  the  roving  ideal 
from  its  lair  in  the  cell  of  the  polyp  to  its 
full  growth  in  his  own  brain,  and  he  pins 
the  Eternal  to  a  Law.  His  dreams  trans- 
(20) 


WONDER  21 


figure    the    Known    to    the    Unknowable. 

We  have  no  criterion  for  anything.  We 
live  in  a  Mystery.  The  data  of  life  are 
pleasure  and  pain,  and  these  may  be  myths ; 
an  illusion  of  the  nerve  cells. 

Seas  of  sound,  light  and  motion  swirl  in 
our  brains,  and  the  "great  processes"  are 
cell-eddy.  Thought  is  cerebral  sight.  We 
may  trail  Circumstance  back  to  the  Primal 
Antagonism,  and  there  it  is  lost.  Conscious 
ness  is  the  flash  produced  by  friction.  Birth 
is  recomposition  of  old  matter,  and  death 
is  dissolution  and  recomposition.  Mind  is 
evolved  from  mud,  and .  mud  is  mind  in 
transition.  Form  is  purely  accidental,  and 
the  accidental  is  the  unexpected  inexorable. 
Time  is  the  space  between  thoughts,  and 
thought  is  Time  spluttering.  Space  is  the 
distance  between  two  illusions,  and  illu 
sions  are  what-might-have-been  projected 
on  the  blank  screen  of  tomorrow.  All 
growth  presupposes  pain,  and  all  pain  en 
genders  growth.  Society  is  the  systemati- 
zation  of  instincts,  and  instincts  are  strati 
fied  lusts.  All  knowledge  is  word- juggle. 
To  know  all  would  be  to  know  nothing. 

The  mystic  waits  and  wonders. 

And  this  Wonder  is  the  back-stairs  to 


22  WONDER 


the  stars — it  is  the  Northwest  Passage  to 
the  pinnacle  of  the  cosmos.  It  is  where 
one  beholds  most,  but  where  one  knows 
least.  It  is  to  feel  all  things — yet  to  stand 
in  universal  relations.  It  is  a  vision  of 
things  in  their  totality  but  not  in  their 
wholeness. 

Everything  is  grounded  in  mystery. 
Everything  is  swimming,  and  the  stable 
does  not  exist.  Life  is  a  series  of  guesses, 
and  there  is  mystery  in  a  match.  The  com 
monplace  is  the  habitual,  and  the  habitual 
is  a  mystery  that  has  grown  stale  from 
sense-insistence.  Life  undulates;  there  is 
no  such  thing  as  a  level;  a  straight  line 
is  a  myth,  and  all  directions  are  indirec 
tions.  Up  and  down  are  movable  points 
on  horizons  that  do  not  exist;  focus  is  an 
eye-trick,  and  motion  is  cell-palpitation. 

AH  things  radiate  from  a  common  point, 
and  differences  are  the  same  looked  at  from 
various  angles.  The  sap  that  flows  in  the 
tree,  the  blood  that  flows  in  the  veins,  the 
fires  that  flame  from  the  sun,  the  waters 
that  run  to  the  stars,  and  the  passion  litanies 
breathed  by  lovers  are  aspects  of  force. 
Star-shine  and  eye-glance  and  water-gleam 
are  the  same. 


WONDER  23 


The  star  sees  itself  through  the  medium 
of  the  human  eye,  and  the  moon  shines  on 
itself. 

Law  created  the  brain,  and  the  brain  is 
a  crucible  of  Law.  So  each  thing  is  a 
compendium  of  all  things,  and  still  the  All 
is  not  found. 

All  acts  are  multiplied  in  the  doing.  Our 
breathing  builds  or  destroys  unknown  uni 
verses,  and  a  gesture  is  a  signal  to  eternity. 
The  cells  are  chalices  of  desire.  Every  act 
is  a  breeder  of  beings.  On  what  shore 
breaks  the  last  vibration  caused  by  the 
lowering  of  an  eyelash?  Does  the  lover 
alone  throb  with  ecstasy  when  his  beloved's 
eyes  thicken  with  love-mists?  And  who 
shall  say  that  our  most  subtle  smile  does 
not  stir  to  life  a  thousand  unseen  existences 
that  have  been  quivering  on  the  thresholds 
of  life? 

No  act  ever  succeeds  or  fail;  it  does  both. 
We  influence  the  unknown  at  every  turn. 
We  are  unknown  workers  in  an  unknown 
world.  We  weave  tomorrow  on  the  shuttle 
of  today  and  unravel  the  past  each  minute. 
All  things  are  trying  to  stand  still  and  go 
on  at  the  same  time.  Men  desire  rest  and 
motion  simultaneously.  They  desire  to  go 


24  WONDER 


on  in  order  to  be  able  to  rest.  Self-con 
servation  is  the  basic  principle  in  both  rest 
and  motion.  It  is  an  everlasting  ebb  and 
flow.  But  the  mind  ravished  by  Wonder  is 
beyond  ebb  and  flow. 

"Things  pass  into  their  opposites  by 
accumulation  of  indefinable  quantities," 
says  Walter  Pater.  In  that  process  is 
buried  the  paradox  of  evolution  and  the 
concept  which  breeds  the  mystic  mind.  Hate 
is  comic,  for  you  shall  in  time  become  that 
which  you  hate;  and  the  thing  you  scorn — 
behold!  that  thou  art!  "Tvat  Twam  Asi" 
(for  that  thou  art)  repeats  the  Hindoo 
sage  when  the  West  talks  of  Me,  Thou,  It. 
"Tvat  Twam  Asi"  repeat  Schopenhauer  and 
Emerson.  A  fact  is  but  the  glazed  surface 
on  an  abysmal  mystery.  It  is  the  symbolist 
in  art  who  knows  this.  And  all  symbolists 
are  mystics. 

Evolution  is  a  method,  and  method  is 
the  mantle  of  law.  The  Law  itself  lies  out 
of  time  and  space.  It  is  the  Spencerian 
Eternal  Energy;  it  is  that  which  knows 
neither  "upward"  nor  "downward."  Like 
ether,  it  permeates  all  things;  it  floods  the 
atoms;  it  is  world-shine — consciousness. 

Our   souls    are    a   method — part    of   the 


WONDER  25 


mantle;  and  every  act  is  redolent  of  the 
past.  Things  rise  to  a  summit  and  flow 
down  on  the  other  side,  and  the  baby  in  its 
birth  hour  may  have  attained  the  pinnacle 
of  the  inconceivable,  for  the  birth  of  a  babe 
has  more  of  accomplishment  in  it  than  the 
maturity  of  a  man. 

Nothing  is  spurious ;  all  things  are  in  their 
place.  Artificiality  is  the  curd  on  the  nat 
ural.  No  man  wills;  he  is  willed — for  he 
is  a  growth,  and  his  roots  are  in  the  primor 
dial.  The  secret  is  in  the  seed,  and  the  seed 
is  the  secret.  No  man  can  say,  "I  am 
evolved;"  he  is  forever  evolving.  He  is  a 
"God  in  the  crib,"  and  his  acts  are  only 
hints  of  his  dreams. 

Decay  is  growth  seen  from  the  other 
side.  Decay  and  growth  flout  permanence. 
An  eternal  continuance  dragging  anchor; 
a  measured  swirl  of  unmeasured  waters; 
light  flowering  to  form;  abstraction  mask 
ing  as  a  concretion — what  else  do  we  know? 

We  came  from  the  simian  and  tend  to  the 
sublime;  and  as  the  simian  for  ages  was  big 
with  man,  so  is  the  sublime  heavy  with  its 
unborn  gods.  The  worm  treads  fast  upon 
the  heels  of  God.  Change  has  woven 
shrouds  for  myriads  of  Creators,  for  the 


26  WONDER 


universe  subsists  en  passant.  The  opal  tint 
in  the  dawn  was  spun  by  the  lilies  of  the 
field,  and  the  human  form  is  chiselled  star- 
dust.  Alchemy  is  as  universal  as  gravita 
tion. 

The  universe  began  in  an  equilibration 
and  will  end  in  an  equilibration.  A  sigh, 
an  unrest,  a  faint  ripple  caused  by  some 
antagonistic  principle — and  the  Law  moved, 
and  suffering  was  born.  The  pageantry 
of  the  Fates  began.  Vega  in  Lyra  and  the 
ant  on  its  hill  were  diswombed  in  travail. 

But  why?  With  that  question  Wonder 
falls  on  us. 

You  cannot  seize  upon  the  past  or  the 
future.  The  universe  is  an  eternal  minute 
forever  tottering  to  its  doom — cosmic 
splash;  torrent-mist;  dream  follicles  that 
have  burst  on  the  brain  walls.  Our  sub- 
limest  act  is  still  the  abracadabra  of  an 
Unknown  God — a  God  who  hides  behind 
a  leaf  and  scribbles  his  contrarieties;  a  God 
who  is  flea  and  futurity;  who  is  oxygen  and 
Arcturus.  There  are  cabals  held  in  the 
acorn,  and  the  gods  are  enthroned  in  diatom. 
The  radiating  laws  are  hubbed  on  a  pimple, 
and  "evolution"  is  but  a  spoke  in  the  Wheel 
of  Fire. 


WONDER  27 


Genius  has  Wonder;  it  is  its  sixth  sense. 
The  being  that  has  envisaged  the  cosmos 
in  a  glance  exhales  the  ether  of  the  un- 
plumbed  spaces  his  eyes  have  beheld.  He 
is  a  white  flame  fleshed  for  the  nonce.  And 
his  poems  and  pictures  and  philosophies 
are  fables  of  Wonder. 

Without  this  sense  of  Wonder  the  sing 
ing  of  the  stars  is  calliope  music;  the  uni 
verse  is  doggerel. 

With  the  mystic  gleam  the  universe  is 
still  doggerel — but  scrawled  by  a  Shakes 
peare. 

Science  is  bankrupt.  The  unlettered 
mystic  in  the  Indian  forest  three  thousand 
years  ago  knew  what  science  is  just  now 
beginning  to  tell  us.  They  now  announce 
that  atoms  are,  after  all,  but  centres  of 
force.  "There  is  no  such  thing  as  matter," 
said  the  Hindoo  complacently  ages  ago. 
Science  has  discovered  a  substance  called 
radium,  which  gives  forth  particles  without 
losing  weight.  Nothing  can  be  lost,  nothing 
can  be  gained  in  an  infinite  universe,  has 
been  the  essence  of  mystical  teaching  from 
Heraclitus  to  Emerson.  Wonder's  method 
is  divination. 

To  the  mystic,  life  is  a  "conscious  slum- 


28  WONDER 


ber."  Goethe  and  Balzac  were  great  som 
nambulists  who  in  a  dream  wrote  hastily 
and  feverishly  what  they  thought  they  saw, 
then  went  back  to  bed  again.  Poe's  soul 
never  awakened  to  a  single  reality.  From 
the  ebon  vaults  of  the  Unconscious  it  stole 
upon  a  world  of  toppling  shadows,  ashen 
days  and  vaporous,  opiate  sallows.  In 
stead  of  universal  law  he  felt  the  universal 
awe,  and  his  life  was  a  meditation  on 
shadows. 

Walt  Whitman  had  but  to  name  a  thing 
and  straightway  that  thing  became  a  mys 
tery.  This  solid-seeming  and  substantial 
world  he  made  to  reel  and  hung  the  mystic 
glamour  of  his  soul  upon  the  ant.  He  saw 
no  greater  mystery  than  the  hair  on  the 
back  of  his  hand,  and  he  said  that  "a  glance 
of  the  eye  shall  confound  the  science  of  all 
time." 

The  plodding  fact-grubber  crawls  upon 
a  rim  like  a  fly  on  a  vase,  but  the  mystic 
is  the  light  within. 

To  those  who  walk  the  world  with  open 
eyes  yet  see  not — those  bald  realists  who 
believe  that  when  you  have  named  a  star 
you  have  explained  it — ideas  stand  for 
things.  But  to  the  mystic  things  stand  for 


WONDER  29 


ideas.  They  translate  particulars  into  gen 
erals.  Goethe  drew  the  universe  into  his 
soul,  and  his  dying  words  were,  "More 
Light."  He  had  translated  all  things  into 
thoughts  and  all  thoughts  into  visions,  and, 
standing  of  all  men  of  the  century  on  the 
pinnacle  of  the  spirit,  he  still  stood  in  the 
dark.  The  light  he  had  was  just  great 
enough  to  show  him  the  impenetrability  of 
the  darkness  beyond  and  around.  But  he 
fared  forth  with  Wonder  in  his  soul. 

The  mystics  in  philosophy,  literature  and 
art  do  not  differ  essentially  in  any  age. 
Environment  cannot  touch  them.  Knowl 
edge  comes — and  goes;  the  mystic  lingers. 
He  is  above  time  and  clime,  and  the 
"modern  investigators"  are  ancient  crooners 
that  shall  be.  Heraclitus  or  Maeterlinck, 
Lucretius  or  Tolstoi,  Spinoza  or  Thomas 
Hardy,  Sir  Thomas  Browne  or  Amiel, 
Buddha  or  Carlyle,  Shelley  or  D'Annunzio 
— their  premise  is  everlastingly  the  same: 
Shadows  that  emerge  from  a  Void,  scud 
across  the  earth,  some  in  fury,  some  in 
pallid  calm — and  then  the  Void  again.  A 
ring,  a  circle;  an  arc  of  consciousness,  an 
arc  of  sleep ;  an  emergence  and  a  disappear 
ance — like  that  illusion  of  stagecraft  where- 


30  WONDER 


in  fifty  men,  by  marching  in  a  circle  before 
and  behind  the  scenery,  simulate  an  in 
finite  host — that  is  life. 

These  solemn-suited  Brethren  of  Wonder 
dwell  in  the  husk  of  things,  but  are  not  of 
the  husk.  They  are  wizard  souls  glaring 
through  the  lattice  of  dreams,  praying 
sceptics  immured  in  the  Tomb  with  the 
Black  Panels.  Their  type  of  face  is  the 
face  of  Percy  Bysshe  Shelley — the  Angel 
Israfel  in  flesh. 


THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT 

THE   refinements   of   civilization   are 
more     dangerous     than     the     frank 
brutalities  of  savagery;  it  is  a  sub 
stitution  of  the  serpent  for  the   prowling 
man-eater;  the  substitution  of  an  insidious 
corruption  for  a  ceaseless  battle  in  the  day 
light.  In  a  state  of  nature  the  weakest  go 
to  the  wall;  in  a  state  of  over-refined  civil 
ization  both  the  weak  and  the  strong  even 
tually  go  to  the  wall. 

Civilization  is  the  last  refinement  of  the 
herding  instinct.  All  weakness  is  centri 
petal.  Strength  is  centrifugal.  The  "so 
cial  instinct"  is  a  phase  of  fear. 

As  Nietzsche  has  pointed  out,  our  "rights" 
are  our  mights — that  is,  the  thing  we  have 
the  power  to  do  (if  there  go  along  with 
it  the  power  to  immunize  oneself  from 
penalty)  we  do;  in  fact,  must  do.  Govern 
ment  imposes  penalties  on  those  who  trans 
gress  its  ordinances — that  is,  it  opposes 
power  with  power;  escapes  a  pain  by  pre- 
(31) 


32         THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT 

scribing  one.  The  excuse  made  is  that  "the 
welfare  of  the  whole  race"  is  at  stake — that 
is,  organized  society  must  forever  make 
war  on  minorities.  And  yet,  if  our  view 
take  in  a  great  space  of  time,  we  see  these 
minorities  becoming  majorities  and  the 
majorities  passing  into  minorities.  When 
the  latter  are  ensconsed  in  power  they, 
forgetting  their  former  "rights"  as  minor 
ities,  use  exactly  the  same  methods  to  per 
petuate  themselves  as  did  their  enemies, 
now  their  prey. 

The  law  of  gravitation  is  the  only  dis 
coverable  moral  law  in  the  universe.  Gravi 
tation  is  involved  in  every  "right."  Without 
gravitation  the  words  good  and  evil  could 
not  exist;  we  could  have  no  attractions  and 
repulsions.  The  things  to  which  I  am  at 
tracted  and  which  are  attracted  to  me — 
those  things  I  have  a  "right"  to;  they  are 
my  veiled  destinies,  my  veritable  selves.  A 
"right"  springs  from  a  need,  and  need  is 
the  ethical  equivalent  of  the  physical  law  of 
gravitation. 

The  obstacles  that  stand  in  the  path  of 
my  inexorable  attractions  must  die — or  else 
slay  me.  It  is  merely  a  question  of  which 
is  the  stronger,  not  whose  is  the  trespass. 


THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT         33 

Strength  and  Strength's  will  is  the  supreme 
ethic.  All  else  are  dreams  from  hospital 
beds,  the  sly  goodness  of  weak  souls. 

It  is  the  weak  man  who  urges  compro 
mise — never  the  strong  man.  A  weak  man 
is  one  who  has  not  the  courage  of  his  gravi 
tations;  a  strong  man  is  the  converse  of 
this.  Power  knows  no  evil  but  the  threat 
ened  destruction  of  itself. 

The  essence  of  willing  is  self-destruction 
— and  aggression;  self -exploitation  cannot 
be  conceived  of  except  as  aggression.  A 
society  prospers  materially  in  so  far  as 
each  individual  aggresses  on  the  other.  It 
is  called  "Business."  The  problem  is  how 
to  subtilize  it.  "Immorality"  is  the  essence 
of  "progress."  There  is,  it  is  true,  a  com 
mon  sense  that  "holds  a  fretful  realm  in 
awe."  But  it  is  no  more  "moral"  than 
gravitation  or  the  centrifugal  and  centri 
petal  forces  that  preserve  the  orbit  of  the 
planet.  It  is  a  mechanical  law  with  social 
implications. 

This  element  of  warfare  is  so  deeply  rooted 
in  the  nature  of  things — it  is  so  absolutely 
a  necessity  if  the  universe  is  to  continue 
to  exist — that  Nature  in  order  to  perpet 
uate  herself  everlastingly  invents  opposites 


34        THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT 

to  attain  her  ends.  Thus  love.  Affection 
is  one  of  the  World-Spirit's  devices  for 
more  effectually  carrying  on  her  war  of 
part  against  part.  It  is  a  minor  device  in 
the  Great  Method.  Woman  is  the  strong 
man's  recreation;  or,  in  cosmic  language, 
after  depletion,  replenishment. 

Supreme  happiness  engenders  not  only 
the  feeling  of  exalted  well-being  in  our 
selves  but  an  overmastering  desire  to  make 
others  suffer  by  either  forcibly  imposing 
our  happiness  upon  them  or  tantalizingly 
parading  it  before  their  eyes.  Or  the  su 
premely  happy  may  show  the  masked  cru 
elty  of  this  state  by  patronizing  those  in 
pain — by  creating  obligations,  to  be  col 
lected  in  the  form  of  charity-kisses  when 
their  own  painful  season  comes  on.  To 
prey — to  prey — that  is  our  essence.  If  we 
cannot  be  powerful  and  happy  and  prey 
on  others  we  invent  conscience  and  prey  on 
ourselves. 

Have  you  divined  the  secret  thoughts 
of  those  who  privily  pride  themselves  on 
their  life  of  self-sacrifice? — how,  finding 
none  to  pat  them  on  the  back,  they  fabri 
cate  in  their  own  souls  a  Greater  than  they 
who  tells  them  each  night:  "Well  done,  my 


THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT        35 

servant."  Ah!  the  compliments  this  mystic 
being  pays  them  I  In  spite  of  their  smug, 
dutiful  countenances  they,  too,  have  their 
bloated  ego  for  companionship.  They  must 
find  a  reward  somewhere  for  their  self- 
slaughter.  So  intoxicated  do  they  become 
in  their  self-adulations,  so  hysterically 
happy  are  these  beings  with  their  flagellant 
rites  that  they  seek  to  impose  their  beatifi 
cation  on  others.  So  they  invented  Christ 
and  pass  "Christian  laws." 

Humanity  cannot  escape  its  origins;  it 
admires  force  more  than  "goodness."  It 
will  applaud  power  unallied  to  moral  prin 
ciples,  but  never  moral  principles  unallied 
to  power.  It  loves  the  bold,  though  the 
bold  be  "bad." 

Only  in  the  fury  of  excess  does  one  catch 
glimpses  of  the  immortal  truths.  Ah!  the 
divine  excess  in  great  things — the  excess 
that  shot  Mont  Blanc  toward  the  stars,  the 
excess  of  life-force  that  sent  Byron  flaming 
through  Europe,  the  excess  that  flung  Ver- 
laine  into  the  gutter!  They  who  keep  the 
balances  live  long — and  see  nothing. 

No  two  men's  environments  are  the  same 
because  no  two  men's  mental  states  are  the 
same.  Environment  is  a  series  of  mental 


36         THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT 

states  superposed  on  a  hypothetical  world. 
Environment  is  not  "the  sum  of  the  forces 
which  surround  you,"  but  the  sum  of  the 
illusions  which  fire  your  brain. 

All  suffering  is  caused  by  an  obstacle  in 
the  path  of  a  force.  See  that  you  are  not 
your  own  obstacle. 

All  willing  is  not  necessarily  a  willing 
into  fuller  life,  but  it  is  invariably  a  willing 
away  from  death.  Man  gives  little  thought 
to  his  destination  so  long  as  he  can  remain 
out  of  reach  of  his  Pursuer. 

The  right  to  live  has  never  been  proved 
except  by  the  murderer  and  the  thief. 

There  are  countless  reasons,  no  doubt, 
why  we  should  not  be  evil,  but  it  is  impos 
sible  to  think  of  a  single  rational  reason 
why  we  should  be  "good."  "Goodness"  does 
not  necessarily  bring  health,  wealth,  wisdom 
or  peace  of  mind.  Rather  is  it  a  smiling 
martyrdom. 

The  joy  of  the  savage  who  has  slain  his 
enemies,  the  joy  of  the  ascetic-saint  who 
has  slain  his  instinctive  nature  are  both 
derived  from  the  same  source,  the  pleasure 
of  putting  something  to  death. 

If  all  Christians  were  like  Christ  there 
would  be  no  necessity  for  Christianity;  for 


THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT        37 

when  once  we  have  achieved  absolutely  and 
in  every  particular  our  object,  our  passion, 
our  dream,  the  motives  that  urged  us  on  to 
that  consummation  disappear,  and  we  are 
left  in  exactly  the  same  predicament  from 
which  we  wriggled.  There  is  no  Utopia 
that  would  be  worth  living  in  for  a  single 
month.  Unless  you  are  prepared  for  pain, 
prepared  to  kill,  skirt  precipices  and  be 
killed,  you  will  always  remain  a  decadent, 
i.  e.,  an  idealist,  a  sick  man. 

The  Christian  "Kingdom  of  God,"  where 
the  weak,  the  stunted,  the  underfed  and  the 
outcasts  shall  riot  and  roister  and  gorge 
and  swill  and  blaspheme  at  the  strong 
earth-man  singing  his  deathless  war-chant 
in  the  hell-pits  of  strife! 

There  is  no  rising  from  lower  to  higher 
in  social  systems — there  is  only  a  constant 
redistribution  of  mediocrity,  a  thinning  or 
a  thickening  of  the  crust  beneath  which 
glows  the  passion  for  liberty. 

When  society  no  longer  exists  for  the  wel 
fare  of  the  individual  both  must  go,  but  the 
individual  will  be  the  last  to  disappear  be 
cause  he  was  the  first  to  appear.  Hence 
to  live  for  others  to  the  exclusion  of  self 
tends  to  the  annihilation  of  both.  But  to 


38        THE  ALMIGHTINESS  OF  MIGHT 

live  for  self  to  the  exclusion  of  others  does 
not  necessarily  tend  to  the  annihilation  of 
both  the  individual  and  society,  for  it  is 
easier  to  conceive  of  the  existence  of  a  single 
individual  without  society  than  it  is  to  con 
ceive  of  society  without  a  single  individual. 

Wherever  "justice"  has  righted  a  wrong 
it  has  wronged  a  right. 

The  social  system  is  maintained  by  oppos 
ing  one  vice  to  another ;  it  is  a  balance  main 
tained  by  bogus  weights.  The  aggressive 
instincts  of  the  individual  are  held  in  check 
by  the  threatened  aggression  of  many  in 
dividuals. 


THE    INTANGIBLE    LIFE 

LIFE  is  a  manifestation  of  uncon 
scious  ideas,  a  flowerlike  exfolia 
tion  from  an  unseen,  unknown 
within  to  a  visible,  known  without,  of  which 
death  is  the  rim. 

The  mind,  the  earlier  mind,  of  man,  half 
opened,  as  a  flower  just  before  dawn,  be 
holding,  fearing,  this  rim — this  almost  tan 
gible  cessation  of  the  activities  of  the  be 
loved  body — reacts  upon  itself  in  thought, 
seeking  blindly  for  something  of  the  in 
finite  beyond  matter;  dreaming  thus  of 
gaming  for  mental,  spiritual  intensity  what 
so  soon  must  be  lost  in  space  and  time; 
asking,  as  it  were,  a  concession  from  Fate 
by  a  steady  withdrawal  from  participation 
in  her  more  obvious  empire,  the  external 
world. 

So  is  the  dream  born;  and  from  the  un 
mapped  territories  in  the  atoms  in  the  brain 
there  springs  a  being  within  a  being — the 
imaginative-prophetic  soul,  forerunner  of 
(39), 


40 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

the  Intangible  Life,  the  subverter  and 
sapper  of  the  external  world,  a  thing  that 
shall  function  in  the  limitless. 

To  beings  so  elected — few  and  unique 
among  those  who  live  literally,  the  mud- 
worms — the  nearest  thing  is  the  remotest 
thing.  They  are  never  quite  socketted  in 
their  environment,  never  quite  come  into 
contact  with  their  own  bodies.  Extension, 
encounter  and  impact  of  bodily  things  are 
not  true  for  them.  They  stand  with  one 
hand  upon  the  door-bolt,  about  to  go  forth 
from  their  enchanted  souls  into  the  grooves 
of  practical  life;  but  they  never  make  the 
motion  that  is  decisive.  Merely  they  stand 
there  to  listen  apperceptively,  or  they  peer 
through  the  knot-hole  of  sense  at  the  elabo 
rate  rituals  of  buffoonery. 

Standing  farther  away  from  life,  they 
stand  nearer  to  that  which  gives  life;  mov 
ing  not  anywhere,  they  are  everywhere. 
They  are  never  real  in  the  sense  that  a 
wall  is  real,  being  at  most  mere  effigies  of 
flesh  and  blood  leashed  to  a  Vision. 

They  have  for  environment  all  that  is 
conceivable,  all  that  is  scooped  into  the  nets 
of  imagination  and  intelligence  from  the 
abysses  of  the  unsounded  inland  sea — things 


THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 41 

strange,  things  chastened  by  ages  of  im 
mobility  and  deep-sea  lave,  residue  of  lost 
worlds,  and  things  still  alive  reaching 
through  the  tangled  treasure  of  the  soul 
hands  that  grip,  forcing  through  to  the  day 
the  short,  agonized  utterance  of  the  baffled. 
And,  in  rarer  moments,  they  are  environed 
by  the  inconceivable — by  those  bare  hints 
that  are  the  souls  of  the  great  unuttered 
poems,  and  by  those  stranger  epiphanies 
that  amaze,  illuminate  and  destroy  sense's 
last  belief  in  sense. 

One  may  pick  the  world  apart,  pick  it 
to  its  last  shred  of  matter;  but  it  is  pre 
cisely  here  that  life — the  inexplicable,  un- 
analyzable,  intangible  roots  of  matter — 
begins,  and  the  scalpel  must  abdicate  in 
favor  of  the  imagination,  the  winged  intel 
ligence. 

Imagination  is  a  spurt  from  the  depths 
of  Being,  a  swirling  geyser  that  gravitates 
to  a  zenith  set  in  the  infinite. 

Memory  cannot  take  us  beyond  ourselves, 
cannot  carry  us  further  than  the  experiences 
of  our  special  form  of  existence;  it  moves 
in  limits  always.  But  in  the  mystic  imagi 
nation  will  be  found  the  fragmentary 
records  of  pasts  long  swallowed  up,  the 


42 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

shining  dust  of  worlds  crumbled  beyond 
possibility  of  reintegration,  the  whirling, 
blazing  meteoric  stones  flung  from  the 
wrecks  of  incalculably  remote  selves. 

Some  golden  minute  overlooked  in  Time's 
monstrous  hour,  a  miraculous  survival  in 
the  impersonal  memory  of  a  wonder-time, 
ungarnered  of  Oblivion:  such  magical 
visitors  come  to  the  bedside  of  the  ever- 
dying  body!  For  the  Eternal  Dreamer, 
which  is  the  soul  of  man,  never  dies,  though 
dreams  themselves  are  made  of  perishables. 

We  dreamed  as  impulse  and  desire  in 
our  parents  and  are  lured  into  our  bodies 
by  vague  imaginings,  urged  from  husk  to 
husk  by  the  impetus  of  Karma,  the  spirits 
of  accumulated  past  acts.  Whatever  one 
dreams  tends  to  beget  a  body,  and  what  we 
are  now  is  old  dream  come  to  be  the  phan 
tasm  of  place,  ancestral  imagination  turned 
brain  and  sinew  and  blood. 

The  divinizing  imagination  can  detach 
itself  from  this  present  crucible  wherein 
it  flows  for  a  day  and  plunge  into  that  age 
less  past,  circumventing  the  shameful  quick 
ness  of  life,  superposing  on  the  sullen  mys 
tery  of  death  the  greater  miracle  of  con 
tinuity  through  perpetual  effacement. 


THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 43 

Inundating  me,  I  am  back-rendered  to 
the  things  I  was,  fore-rendered  to  the  things 
I  must  be,  resolving  in  a  single  eye-shot  my 
marvellous  complexities  into  their  simples; 
beholding  in  this  vile  impulse  the  ravin  of 
some  old  fatality:  recognizing  in  this  im 
medicable  wound  in  the  soul  the  work  of 
the  Avenger  who  seeks  out  the  unbalanced 
and  the  impenitent — the  old  wolf  with  shin 
ing  tooth  who  prowls  and  whelps  forever  in 
the  souls  of  us ! 

Imagination  is  thus  the  menstruum  of  all 
materials,  and  the  poet  in  his  contempla 
tions  gathers  up  this  world  in  his  brain  as 
one  gathers  waters  in  the  hand.  It  was 
Alexander  who  sat  down  and  wept  because 
there  were  no  more  worlds  to  conquer.  Had 
he  been  a  devotee  of  the  Intangible  Life 
he  would  have  wept  because  he  could  not 
conquer  all  the  worlds  he  saw. 

Only  the  poet  can  track  Time  back  to 
its  source,  only  the  mystic  is  permitted  to 
step  out  of  space  or  to  lift  the  veil  of  the 
uncircumstanced,  where  images  fail,  but 
imagination  still  leads,  where  the  guess  is 
the  only  certainty,  where  logic  is  nursery 
block-building.  He  is  the  live  king  in  the 
catacombs  of  matter;  the  mummy  that  has 


44 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

split  its  wrappings  and  wings  away.  He 
dislodges,  disturbs,  seeing  in  Law  merely 
the  method  of  miracles. 

Not  where  I  am,  but  where  I  dream — 
there  am  I. 

When  the  sword  is  absent  from  the  sheath 
what  matter  where  the  sheath  dangles? 

My  body  may  be  beside  you,  but  I  may 
not  be  there — nor  anywhere  where  that 
body  could  follow.  All  our  troubles  come 
from  standing  too  close  to  our  skins.  The 
sword  becomes  bitten  by  the  acids  that  cor 
rode  the  scabbard.  Sorrow  is  often  only 
an  error  of  vision. 

Imagination  is  a  form  of  hunger.  Ani 
mals  have  little  imagination  because  they 
are  easily  satisfied — food  and  sexual  gra 
tification  are  all  they  require.  The  most 
powerful  imaginations  are  found  in  the  un 
happy.  Poverty  drives  genius  to  the  Intan 
gible  Life  or  brigandage.  All  great  imag 
inative  art  is  a  transcript  of  world-sorrow, 
a  record  of  things  imperfect.  All  art  is 
a  record  of  the  Intangible  Life,  a  confes 
sion  of  the  inadequacy  of  action.  Nature 
has,  in  the  intellect  of  man,  bred  her  foe. 
She  has  in  her  blind  willing  willed  her  doom. 
There  is  always  a  tendency  in  the  intellec- 


THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 45 

tual  mind  to  reject  the  things  of  sense,  or 
to  use  them  merely  to  further  the  ends  of 
understanding.  And  the  more  the  brain 
understands  the  less  the  body  lusts. 

The  intellect  is  religious:  it  demands  a 
rational  universe.  No  end  that  is  merely 
a  rebeginning  can  be  a  rational  end. 

The  imagination — the  eye  of  the  intellect 
— strains  its  orbs  in  search  of  another  kind 
of  eternity  than  that  in  which  we  lie  quite 
helpless.  And  on  her  retina  there  is  a  tiny 
shadow  of  the  Reality. 

Certain  beings  there  are  who  seem  to  be 
doing  a  work  in  some  other  sphere,  to  be 
occupied  elsewhere,  to  be  mere  shadowy 
visitants  of  earth,  looking  on  things  about 
them  as  clumsy  forgeries  of  something 
divinely  writ — writ  on  other  and  finer 
parchments  than  stone  and  earth  and  wave. 
That  feeling  of  walking  in  a  "world  unreal 
ized"  is  no  poetic  myth,  but  the  actual  daily 
experience  of  a  type  of  mind  not  so  rare 
as  most  believe.  It  is  direct  contact  with 
Reality,  the  everlasting  mood  of  the  Un 
changeable. 

It  is  the  secret  of  the  Intangible  Life, 
this  contact  with  the  great  scene-shifter; 


46 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

and  perpetual  melancholy  is  given  for  its 
birthmark. 

The  agony  of  those  on  whom  has  fallen  the 
Infinite!  of  those  doomed  to  sit  up  to  their 
eyes  in  the  brack  of  this  world  and  to  feel 
that  above  the  eyes  they  are  bathed  by  the 
waters  that  flow  nowhither  from  out  the 
nowhere.  These  centaurs  of  the  mud  and 
of  the  azure  cannot  take  the  common  part, 
yet  they  cannot  reject  it  wholly.  Cakes 
and  ale  and  the  hair-shirt  they  spurn;  cakes 
and  ale  and  the  hair-shirt  are  theirs  still. 
Their  brooding,  wistful  faces  peer  across 
the  sills  of  the  House  of  Revels  and  they 
pass  on,  unallied,  aliens  beneath  an  alien 
sun.  To  them  the  shoulders  of  Time  seem 
overweighted,  forever  and  forever  holding 
up  this  accumulating  burden  of  evil,  this 
daily  increment  of  deed  and  dream,  this  per 
petual  transference  of  today's  burdens  to 
the  shoulders  of  endless  reluctant  tomor 
rows. 

The  abstract  mind,  with  its  dower  of 
imaginative  sight,  swallows  up  all  its  im 
pulses  toward  practical  life.  Why  should 
a  man  do  anything  when  all  that  is  done 
changes  in  the  doing?  Our  own  motions 
generate  the  cataracts  that  carry  us  to- 


THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 47 

ward  life.  The  whole  universe  changes  in 
the  moment  of  contemplation.  There  is 
a  dying  and  a  resurrection  of  each  thing 
and  all  things  each  second.  Into  that  bot 
tomless  sea  of  the  Infinite  there  tumble  all 
stars,  all  peoples,  all  pleasant  ways,  all 
bitter  memories,  all  sub-human  and  super 
human  compounds,  all  the  organized 
shadows  which  we  call  things. 

The  being  gnawed  by  this  monstrous,  in 
visible  super-concept  is  something  of  a  god. 
There  is  no  rest  for  him  night  or  day: 
come  spring,  come  autumn;  come  birth, 
come  death — it  is  all  to  him  as  though  it 
were  not.  For  over  and  under  and  round 
about  he  sees,  like  the  Ancient  Mariner, 
Life-in-Death  and  Death-in-Life,  and 
things  visit  his  ear  dully  and  life  slides  by 
like  distant  shores  seen  through  a  tropic 
haze — himself  caught  in  the  debris,  half  of 
him  gravitating  toward  the  Viewless,  the 
other  half  full  socketted  in  matter. 

Matter!  There  are  those  who  have  done 
away  with  that  clog.  If  one  stay  long 
enough  with  inorganic,  inanimate  things, 
concentrate  his  thought  on  their  inertness, 
their  deadly  calm,  one  becomes  curiously 
aware  of  something  bordering  on  semi- 


48 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

intelligible  expectancy  in  their  attitudes. 
The  table,  bed,  chair  in  a  room,  under  this 
mental  surveillance,  will  become  half- 
create.  These  dumb  things,  somehow,  as 
sume  an  air  of  questioning  watchfulness — 
as  of  embryons  about  to  receive  the  spark 
that  will  stir  their  limbs  and  engender  move 
ment.  Motion  and  rest  seem  one  thing,  and 
the  Reality  underlying  each  comes  out 
stark. 

Mind  and  matter  are  one  thing  operating 
in  two  ways  under  one  primal  impulse — 
the  impulse  of  appetite.  There  is  a  passion 
of  change  in  matter,  and  one  of  the  results 
of  this  passion  has  been  the  production  of 
mind.  Matter  is  the  subsidence  of  passion, 
mind  in  the  gross  state. 

If  it  were  not  for  the  principle  of  decay — 
that  is,  the  principle  of  evanescing  change — 
we  should  be  able  to  see  a  tree  become  a 
man  in  the  evolutionary  series  before  our 
very  eyes  and  the  solidest  boulder  trans 
form  itself  into  a  crying  baby. 

It  was  with  this  knowledge  that  Walt 
Whitman  apostrophised  a  tree  as  "Thou  un 
told  life  of  me!"  No  man's  life  is  long 
enough  nor  his  instruments  of  perception 
keen  enough  to  behold  this  translation.  The 


THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 49 

imagination  alone  conceives  it  and  knows 
that  it  is  so.  The  passion  of  Pygmalion 
made  of  the  statue  of  Galatea  a  breath 
ing,  living  woman.  The  legend  is  eternally 
true.  The  living  are  the  dead  made  mani 
fest;  and  the  so-called  dead  are  the  living 
unmanifest. 

Every  word  we  utter  is  but  the  utterance 
of  a  drowsy  phantom  in  our  blood,  the  open 
ing  of  the  lips  of  a  spectre.  For  this  reason 
in  rare  moments  of  self-consciousness  our 
voice  sounds  strange,  far  away,  not  ours. 
It  is  the  sudden  perception  of  that  great 
truth:  We  are  not  ourselves. 

The  human  soul,  the  Eternal  Substance, 
is  the  immortal  Spectator  and  placid  Ob 
server  of  the  endless  recurrence  of  its  own 
shadows.  Thought  is  the  endless  recurrence 
of  its  dreams;  movement  the  endless  recur 
rence  of  its  method.  At  the  end  of  un 
imaginably  vast  cycles  of  time  the  Soul 
swallows  its  own  consciousness  and  draws 
back  into  itself  its  shadows,  which  we  call 
matter;  its  dreams,  which  we  call  thought; 
its  method,  which  we  call  motion.  And  all 
that  was  lies  dormant  in  the  Nought,  a 
possibility  of  Nothing.  It  is  the  Sabbath 
of  works  and  days.  The  Eternal  Substance 


50 THE  INTANGIBLE  LIFE 

lives  as  a  desire,  and  shadows  and  dreams 
and  motion  are  born  again,  and  the  endless 
bitter  burdens  are  taken  up  once  more. 

The  native  interior  sense,  the  quick  ap 
prehension  of  the  soul  of  things,  some  sud 
den  rebirth  in  the  brain  of  knowledge  that 
had  long  lain  dormant — this  is  the  most 
marvellous  of  human  possessions.  He  who 
has  it  in  large  measure  may  skip  all  learn 
ing,  for  he  has  wisdom;  and  wisdom  is  the 
instinct  for  values — a  lightning  in  the  soul 
that  strikes  the  husk  of  illusion  from  the 
kernel  of  eternality  and  lays  bare  the  essen 
tial. 

The  deepest  wisdom  has  nothing  to  do 
with  facts,  with  accuracy,  with  proof,  cor- 
roboration.  Wisdom  is  the  Fact.  It  is  the 
gift  of  the  Intangible  Life. 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

TO  wish  for  the   fulfilment  of  your 
desire — that  is  childish.     To  fear  the 
fulfilment    of    your    desire — that    is 
the  beginning  of  spiritual  senility.    To  de 
sire  not  to  desire — that  is  wisdom. 

All  great  negations  are  at  last  splendid 
affirmations.  We  renounce  by  desiring  not 
to  have,  and  to  say,  "I  refrain"  is  really 
to  say,  "I  will  not  to  will."  This  is  the 
humor  of  all  great  refusals.  We  reject 
the  pennies  because  we  covet  the  gold 
pieces,  and  spurn  brown  bread  for  the 
manna  that  may  fall  to  us.  There  is  a 
latent  Yea  in  each  great  Nay. 

Absolute  renunciations  cannot  be  con 
ceived.  We  forsake  the  worse  for  the 
better,  the  gutter  for  the  stars,  counterfeit 
days  for  real  days,  the  senses  for  the  super- 
senuous.  The  dominating  instinct  can  only 
be  overcome  by  a  dominating  instinct.  We 
are  the  gibes  of  an  eternal  Will.  Turn 
wheresoever  we  may  we  cannot  escape  it. 
(51) 


52  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

When  we  give  it  battle  we  are  most  its  bond 
man.  It  smiles  back  at  us  from  the  end  of 
our  swords,  and  when  we  flee  from  it,  it  is 
both  pursuer  and  pursued. 

The  militant  renunciants,  from  the 
Buddha  to  Schopenhauer,  have  been  the 
founders  of  powerful  movements — power 
ful  negations,  if  one  likes — strenuous  nays. 
These  flesh-walled  prisons  were  too  narrow 
for  the  mighty  lusts  of  their  souls ;  this  spin 
ning  green  pebble  was  too  small  a  stage 
for  their  spirit-strut.  They  counselled  renun 
ciation  here  for  a  mightier  life  "elsewhere." 
They  would  lay  waste  the  temporal  order 
with  the  flaming  fagots  of  their  dreams,  let 
loose  the  thirst-parched  hounds  of  endless 
desire  from  their  kennels  of  clay,  rip  the 
mask  from  the  minute,  drain  eternity  of  its 
secrets,  and  plant  their  streamers  of  affirma 
tion  on  the  last  cosmic  ruin.  Renunciation! 
There  is  no  such  thing.  No  is  a  transfig 
ured  Yes.  Renunciations  are  the  cocoons 
in  which  the  delicate  silk  of  our  finer  de 
sires  is  spun. 

The  process  of  evolution,  the  whole  of 
that  marvellous  exfoliation  from  the  amoeba 
to  Thomas  Hardy,  is  a  process  of  "renun 
ciation,"  a  progressive  leaving  behind,  a 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES  53 

sloughing  off,  an  endless  denial,  an  eternal 
series  of  terminations  that  are  beginnings, 
and  beginnings  that  are  only  valuable  be 
cause  they  record  terminations.  The  uni 
verse  is  eternally  dying  in  order  to  live. 
We  give  up  what  we  must  when  we  must. 
A  deeper  necessity  than  our  likes  and  dis 
likes  commands.  We  flower  in  pain.  We 
are  exiles  forever  on  the  march  to  a  Siberia 
whose  terrors  are  purely  imaginative. 

All  thought  is  action  renounced.  The 
elaborated  brain  of  a  Newton,  the  burrow 
ing  mental  eye  of  a  Shakespeare,  the  flame- 
crowned  dreams  of  a  Keats — all  record  the 
inbreedings  of  the  spirit.  The  finer,  the 
higher  life  begins  with  a  veto.  Each  new 
law  repeals  an  old  one,  and  when  we  have 
discovered  the  illusiveness  of  days  we  reso 
lutely  cancel  the  world  in  contemplation, 
and  "renounce"  our  hobbyhorses  for  Pega 
sus. 

Action  is  characteristic  of  life  on  the  in 
stinctive  plane.  A  will-less  inaction  can  be 
reached  only  by  the  few.  The  centers  of 
inhibition  develop  late  in  life.  With  our 
hand  on  that  switchboard  we  may  wreck 
with  a  smile  the  blind,  plunging  impulses. 
The  iron-heeled  spirit  listens  with  pride 


54  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

to  the  crackling  of  the  bones  of  dead  selves 
over  which  it  stalks  in  grim-humorous  de 
fiance — those  selves  of  a  million  yeas;  those 
luring,  seductive  selves  tricked  out  in  a  mil 
lion  guises,  that  solicit  him  by  night,  by 
day — selves  born  of  a  myriad  lapses  in  a 
myriad  lives. 

Procession,  concession,  recession — the 
defiant  "Forward!"  "Forward!"  of  youth, 
the  compromises  of  half -disillusioned  middle 
life;  the  "peccavi!"  of  old  age — that  is  the 
psychical  history  of  the  average  being — 
the  average  being  who  only  learns  that  life 
is  pure  hallucination  after  going  through 
the  horrors,  who  has  no  organ  of  divination, 
who  does  not  believe  in  sewage  until  he  has 
swum  through  a  sewer.  He  renounces 
when  there  is  nothing  left  to  renounce.  He 
confounds  renunciation  with  death.  And 
Tolstoi  is  his  prophet. 

How  few  have  learned  the  art  of  with 
drawing  from  life  noiselessly  and  yet  with 
dignity!  On  a  day  you  have  discovered  the 
mockery  of  it  all;  some  curious  and  swiftly 
knit  suspicion  has  given  you  courage  to  rip 
the  wrappings  from  your  universe,  and  you 
behold  where  you  thought  to  find  God — 
bah ! — a  Cagliostro !  You  announce  from  the 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES  55 

market  place  your  discovery.  A  million 
voices  hiss  in  your  ear  "Traitor!"  The 
totter-kneed  gods  on  their  pasteboard 
thrones  crack  their  whips  at  you.  But  they 
avail  not.  You  have  become  the  spirit  of 
revolt  and  you  will  lay  the  world  in  the 
dust.  You  have  seen  the  core  of  creation 
and  the  vacuity  thereof.  You  have  beheld 
as  in  a  vision  the  sinister  Soul  of  things 
and  the  grin  thereon;  and  you  strike  back 
in  blind  rage  at  the  lies  sacrosanct  with 
age  that  enmesh  you. 

Your  rage  is  useless,  admirable,  asinine. 
Spinoza  glanced  at  the  bill-of-fare,  threw 
it  out  of  the  window  and  took  to  lens -grind 
ing.  Quit  the  stews  without  noise;  thus  only 
may  one  keep  the  beasts  off  his  trail. 

Tomorrow,  that  million-spired  mirage* 
city  toward  which  the  soul  of  man  forever 
wends  its  way;  Tomorrow,  with  myrrh  and 
spice  in  her  casket,  her  fingers  tipped  with 
healing  ointment  for  the  wounds  inflicted  by 
this  unromantic,  calendared  today — To 
morrow  can  be  won  only  by  wooing  Today. 
How  few  can  renounce  the  next  Now!  Yet 
that  way  alone  lies  wisdom.  We  live  be- 
tween-times,  and  nothing  is.  We  are  noc- 
tambulists  forever  stepping  off  into  space. 


56  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

We  live  between  the  minutes,  in  the  mythic 
state  that  separates  and  yet  unites  a  here 
and  beyond.  We  never  quite  touch  our  ob 
jects,  never  close  wholly  the  hand  on  the 
object  of  our  desire.  Always  the  essential 
escapes — the  essence  flies  just  above  our 
heads.  The  St.  Elmo  fire  of  perpetual  illu 
sion  flits  around  us,  and  we  are  our  own 
undoing. 

We  seek  for  a  spirit  of  rationality  in 
things  and  do  not  find  it  because  the  seek 
ing  is  itself  irrational.  Renounce  the  pur 
suit  of  things  and  those  things  will  glide 
silently  into  your  soul.  Seek  not  and  ye 
shall  find :  Let  us  dig  where  we  stand — there 
is  gold  under  our  feet;  the  future  is  a 
pocket,  and  the  fine  glint  on  the  outposts 
of  things  is  but  the  phosphorescent  reflec 
tion  from  the  corpses  of  dead  pasts  on  a 
vacuous  perspective. 

There  is  a  fine  irony  embedded  in  the 
spectacle  of  this  unending  chase  through 
fen  and  forest:  bloodhounds  on  the  scent  of 
eagles  and  butterflies;  arrows,  poison 
tipped,  sent  hurtling  after  fireflies;  vast 
armies  accoutred  to  the  knees,  making 
forced  marches  to  reach  Cockayne. 

Ring,  Olympus,  with  thy  eternal  laugh- 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES  57 

ter!  for  the  solemnity  of  man  is  the  comedy 
of  the  gods! 

The  born  renunciant's  elaborated  appa 
ratus  of  inhibition  is  a  labor-saving  device. 
He  skips  the  living  of  life  in  order  to  at 
tain  a  life  that  lives.     It  is  not  necessary 
to   experience   in   order   to   know.      Some 
souls  hold  the  universe  in  solution  at  birth. 
Their  lives  are  excursions  of  verification. 
They  inventory  the  universe  at  a  glance 
and   divert   their   lusts   toward   the    stars. 
Thrust  into  Eternity's  Black  Hole  with  its 
three  dimensions  of  Time,  Space  and  Cir 
cumstance,   they   disdain   the   wall-feeling, 
wall-pounding  and  clamoring  of  their  fel 
low-prisoners.     Instead  they  fix  their  eyes 
on  the  white  splendor  of  the  dome — and 
wait.    The  Keepers  find  their  bodies  rigid 
in  calm,  a  placid  mock  upon  their  faces. 
Amid  the  babel  their  souls  have  passed  out 
through  the  little  wicket  in  the  great  white 
dome — passed  into — well,  what  matter? 

Life  is  a  lewd  game  of  tag  played  by  I 
Want  and  Catch  Me. 

In  the  last  analysis  our  acts  are  but  the 
combustions  of  cells  big  with  voids.  And 
our  dreams  are  inbreedings — the  obscene 
junctions  of  impotent  potentialities.  Under- 


58  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

standing  is  the  organ  wherewith  we  finally 
comprehend  that  nothing  is.  Discrimination 
is  that  fine  sense  that  places  the  dead  fish 
in  one  pile  and  the  maggots  that  feed  on 
them  in  another.  The  passions  are  brewed 
in  the  cardiac  vats  and  their  steam  singes 
and  scorches  the  body  with  their  senseless 
urgings. 

Life!  a  butchers'  picnic  in  the  Alhambra; 
a  column-cracked,  half -foundered  Venice; 
a  vermin-ridden  Arcady. 

Those  fine  young  seers,  "the  predestined," 
who  walk  out  of  the  gates  of  birth  and  with 
swift  and  sure  step  dart  to  the  center  of 
the  banquet-room  and  overturn  the  grub- 
table  without  tasting  the  edible  junk  have 
abridged  their  lives,  it  is  true,  but  what 
they  have  missed  they  shall  never  feel  the 
need  of.  They  might  have  eaten,  you  say, 
and  then  judged.  Satiety  is  the  hog's 
judgment.  Renunciation  ex  post  facto  is 
fashionable;  besides,  there  are  so  many 
spiritual  Baden-Badens  where  one  may 
have  his  maw  washed  clean.  Real  renun- 
ciants  are  born,  not  tolstoied. 

The  Intellect  is  the  mirror  of  Passion. 
She  looks  into  that  wondrous  glass  and 
murmurs;  "The  same-— yet  I  cannot  touch 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES  59 

thee.  You  are  my  higher  self  shaped  as  a 
face  in  smoke.  I  gave  thee  birth;  you  fol 
low  me;  antic  me  and  are  my  slave — my 
pale  and  wondrous  slave,  as  ethereal  as  I 
am  gross;  my  slave  to  whose  beauty  I  ren 
der  thy  shackles."  Intellect,  forged  in  the 
foundries  of  desire,  that  is  destined  to  strike 
down  the  arm  that  poured  it  molten  in  the 
brain  matrices  and  gouge  out  the  eye  that 
watched  it  cool  to  undestanding.  It  is  the 
Moses  born  amid  the  bulrushes  and  tangled 
weeds  of  elemental  passion — this  mighty 
Moses,  light-smitten  with  Horebic  visions, 
bringing  to  the  groundlings  who  will  listen 
a  new  tablet  of  laws. 

Every  fine  action  implies  or  characterizes 
some  aspect  of  self -conquest,  which  is  an 
other  name  for  renunciation.  Every  fine 
action  is  such  because,  fundamentally,  it 
is  a  negation;  some  door  must  be  shut  be 
fore  we  open  another.  Life  opens  outward 
to  an  inward.  "I  have  gained  on  myself," 
murmurs  the  dreamer  when  he  feels  the  life 
energies  boiling  within  him,  and  with  the 
sure  hand  of  him  who  controls  the  powers 
generated  by  Niagara  Falls  he  directs  those 
energies  into  the  channels  mapped  out  on 
the  dream  parchment  of  his  mind.  None 


60  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

but  those  who  have  experienced  it  know 
of  that  virile  joy,  that  bounding  rapture, 
of  the  spirit  that  deliberately  smiles  a  de 
fiant  no  to  some  old  lure,  some  petty,  tran 
sitory  tickle,  and  hears  in  his  ear  the  long 
halloa!  of  congratulation  from  somewhere 
up  the  heights. 

There  is  nothing  in  the  world  that  is  not 
worth  having,  but  there  is  nothing  in  the 
world  that  is  worth  lifting  the  hand  to  ob 
tain.  We  pay  too  much  for  our  prizes;  we 
are  the  eternal  dupes  of  the  imagination. 
An  Epicurean  receptivity,  the  desire  to 
know,  to  feel,  to  assimilate  all  things — with 
a  semi-humorous  reservation  as  to  the  value 
of  the  things  received;  a  keen  discernment 
of  the  prankishness  that  reigns  at  the  heart 
of  things;  the  ability  to  outlaw  what  you 
cannot  get;  a  looking  without  a  lusting, 
or  to  lust  with  one's  hand  on  the  valve;  an 
alien  attitude  toward  joy,  so  when  she 
comes  it  is  with  the  surprise  of  unexpected 
good  news — something  of  calm,  some  meas 
ure  of  surcease  from  the  terror  of  days  may 
be  won  in  thus  fronting  life. 

Man  makes  of  his  will  the  measure  of  his 
demands.  The  dream  versus  the  brutal 
fact! — the  theme  of  the  finest  tragedy  and 


THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES  61 

comedy.  What  incongruity! — a  Hottentot 
marooned  on  an  iceberg,  or  an  Esquimau 
gravely  assuring  himself  that  the  desert  is 
frigid.  Man  is  capable  of  believing  any 
thing  but  the  truth.  Adaptability  is  the 
process  by  which  one  gets  used  to  the  use- 
lessness  of  things. 

The  intellectual  renunciant,  the  pure 
sceptic  who  has  minimized  the  personal 
equation  in  his  quest  for  rationality  (which 
is,  again,  some  principle  that  will  coddle  a 
temperamental  bias)  assumes  all  truths  to 
be  lies  and  all  lies  aspects  of  some  truth. 
His  universal  premise  is  the  denial  of  all 
premises — each  premise  being  but  the 
termination  of  some  anterior  syllogism.  But 
he  has  faith:  he  assumes  chaos.  He  rips 
from  himself  all  the  tatters  of  mental  cus 
tom  and  aims  at  an  oversight.  His  is  what 
Nietzsche  contemptuously  called  "the  im 
maculate  perception."  The  contradictori- 
ness  of  things  lies  open  to  his  vision.  Im 
pact,  shudder,  dispersion,  recombination  in 
endless  forms  new  and  strange;  this  is  his 
ultimate  formula,  and  beyond — the  Black 
Panel.  What  "highest"  shall  he  choose  in 
this  flowing  frustration?  In  an  evanescing 
universe  what  shall  he  waylay  that  will  give 


62  THE  IRONY  OF  NEGATIVES 

him  more  satisfaction  than  himself?  He 
turns  within  and  chants  with  Walt  Whit 
man,  "Me  imperturbe."  So  he  stands  at 
pause  at  the  cross-roads,  and  life  swirls  in 
and  out  of  these  highways  at  his  feet.  He 
takes  no  road.  The  view  is  finer  from  the 
forks.  Besides,  he  has  his  secret. 


HISTORY 

THE  pomp  of  many  mythical  yester 
days — that  is  history.  History  must 
be  lived;  it  cannot  be  written.    All 
the  paper  in  the  world  could  not  contain 
the  events  of  a  minute. 

As  all  the  events  of  the  past  are  saturated 
with  the  imagination,  written  history  is  the 
annal  of  man's  illusions.  The  past  is  the 
one  thing  we  create  at  each  minute.  It  is 
the  one  thing  that  is  revocable.  It  is  the 
one  thing  we  can  create  in  our  own  image. 
There  are  as  many  Luthers,  as  many  Napo 
leons,  as  many  Robespierres  as  there  are 
minds  that  think  of  them.  The  battle  of 
Waterloo  is  no  more  important  than  you 
believe  it  is.  Cromwell  was  a  murderer  or 
a  saint — you  are  the  judge.  There  are  no 
facts;  there  are  only  beliefs.  There  is  no 
past;  there  is  only  the  kaleidoscope  of  the 
imagination.  There  is  no  history;  there  is 
only  myth. 

In  that  back-travelling  glance  the  trivial 
(63) 


64  HISTORY 


becomes  grandiose;  the  stupendous  is 
rounded  off  with  the  reservations  of  crit 
icism.  And  this  stained-glass  hero  who  to 
day  stands  all  a-glitter  in  the  magic  of  my 
thought  tomorrow  I  shall  hurl  into  the  ditch 
of  disillusion  and  cover  with  the  quicklime 
of  venomous  ridicule. 

"Have  you  read  history?"  Some  one  once 
asked  me.  "No,"  I  replied.  "I  have  never 
even  read  historians." 

Tell  me  the  secret  of  the  violet  and  I 
will  tell  you  the  secret  of  God,  a  poet  said. 
Tell  me  the  secret  of  this  minute  and  I  will 
tell  you  the  secret  of  all  minutes.  And 
until  you  can  tell  me  what  that  event  means 
which  you  call  yourself  I  can  tell  you 
nothing  of  the  meaning  of  history.  I  do  not 
know  that  I  am  not  a  myth.  So  what  can 
I  affirm  of  Caesar?  Livy  and  Tacitus, 
Gibbon  and  Carlyle  reported  their  own 
dreams,  analyzed  their  own  imaginations 
and  wrote  down  themselves.  The  only 
archives  from  which  they  drew  treasures 
were  the  countless  cells  in  the  brain,  and 
their  Messalinas  and  Hannibals  and  Mira- 
beaus  are  as  purely  mythical  as  the  Homeric 
gods. 

The   hot,   steaming   imagination   throws 


HISTORY 


65 


off  its  moons  which  it  calls  its  "facts." 
Grote  had  an  idea,  and  that  idea  had  an 
echo,  and  he  called  it  Greece.  Is  there  a 
I  history  of  England?  No.  There  are 
IHallam's  England,  and  Green's  England, 
I  and  Macaulay's  England. 

Each  man  is  the  conscript  of  his  tem 
perament.    We  know  the  lying  mask  that 
[Memory  draws  over  the  face  of  each  par 
ticular  yesterday.   And  those  infinite  faded 
yesterdays!  Who  shall  unmask  them  shall 

rite  history!  They  are  the  monstrous  pil 
lars  that  stretch  away  into  the  Infinite, 
each  crowned  with  its  separate  Sphinx,  each 

ith  its  separate  riddle,  each  veined  with 
countless  hieroglyphics. 

History  is  not  fascinating,  and  indeed  has 
no  reason  for  being,  until  some  supremely 
|great  poetic  liar — a  Shakespeare,  a  Hugo, 
or  a  Dumas — recreates  it  for  us;  or  until 
tsome  seer  blows  into  its  body  a  fictitious 
l  which  he  calls  a  philosophic  theory. 
The  historian  must  have  a  migratory  imagi 
nation.  He  puts  clothes  on  ghosts.  He  is 
the  tailor  of  dead  men.  The  past  is  his 
clinic  and  he  demonstrates  over  his  own 

'rankensteins. 

History  is,  then,  like  the  visible  universe 


66  HISTORY 


itself,  a  fable  of  the  imagination.  What  I 
see  there  is  there.  To  me  it  is  merely  an 
excuse  for  setting  down  some  thoughts  on 
the  evolution  of  man. 

All  events  from  the  first  appearance  of 
man  on  the  planet  to  the  writing  of  these 
words  constitute  an  Iliad  of  ghastly  jests. 
Man  is  the  anonymous  atom.  He  is  one 
of  the  masks  of  the  Supernatural.  The 
aspirations  of  races  are  born  in  Venetian 
pomp.  They  all  end  in  a  Verdun.  That 
is  the  satiric  repartee  of  our  Antagonist 
hidden  behind  the  arras.  The  history  of  a 
particular  race  is  merely  that  race's  ante- 
mortem  statement  to  posterity,  which  holds 
an  autopsy  on  its  ancestor,  and  starts  to 
write  its  own  ante-mortem  statement. 

The  history  of  mankind!  Listen! — and 
you  shall  hear  the  forlorn  music  made  by 
drowsy  Ghosts  on  violins  of  bronze. 

History  has  a  metaphysic.  It  is  the  will- 
to-persist.  The  will-to-persist  must  not  be 
confused  with  the  will-to-power  of  Nietzsche 
or  the  will-to-live  of  Schopenhauer.  It 
includes  both  of  these.  It  uses  life  and 
power  in  order  to  persist. 

The  race  denies  death.     The  evolution 


HISTORY  67 


of  man  is  the  epic  of  Persistence.  The  spirit 
reaches  out  for  a  Beyond  at  each  of  its 
movements.  To  be  Other,  to  be  Elsewhere, 
to  be  in  the  place  where  one  is  not — that 
is  the  primal  instinct. 

Not  to  be  is  the  only  hell  man  ever 
feared.  Not  to  move  is  the  only  monstrous 
thought  that  can  be  thought.  Not  to  per 
sist  is  the  only  blasphemy  that  repels  him. 
And  all  the  torment  of  existence  flows 
from  this  will-to-persist,  this  inexplicable 
need  of  going — on.  Lashed,  branded, 
stoned,  bludgeoned,  kicked  and  cuffed  from 
hell  to  hell,  spat  upon  by  nature,  vomited 
back  into  life  from  out  the  ground  where  he 
is  laid,  man  fears  but  one  thing:  Boredom— 
the  boredom  of  eternal  extinction.  And  the 
knick-knack  Gods  and  the  sublime  gib 
berish  of  prayer  and  that  vulgar  scuffle 
from  territory  to  territory  which  is  called 
the  "march  of  progress"  are  nothing  but 
the  rumble  and  rattle  of  the  Will-to-Persist. 

The  history  of  the  nations  is  the  search  for 
Utopia.  The  millennium  is  imminent — 
just  ahead.  Egypt,  Greece,  Rome,  China, 
Japan,  America — so  many  multiples  of  the 
besetting,  parasitic  illusion  of  Man.  The 


68  HISTORY 


sacred  scroll  containing  that  eternal  prom 
ise  in  jewelled  letters  unfolds  before  the 
march  of  tribes  and  peoples.  The  New 
Jerusalem  is  by  the  Tiber,  on  the  Missis 
sippi,  on  the  Rhine,  on  the  Nile. 

Into  the  fastnesses  of  their  dreams  there 
never  comes  a  prowling  doubt.  Each  peo 
ple  is  the  chosen  people.  The  Capitol  is 
the  Ark  of  the  Covenant.  Sidon,  Tyre, 
Alexandria,  Athens,  Rome,  Paris,  London, 
Washington  are  the  shining  Ararats  where 
the  tempest-tossed  shall  lodge  in  peace  at 
last! 

History  is,  again,  a  museum  of  cant 
phrases.  Each  nation,  each  people,  has 
its  sacred  syllable  Om,  which  it  repeats  in 
ecstasy.  They  are  the  aphrodisiacs  of  na 
tional  ideals.  Ah,  the  sublime  pneumatic 
catchwords  that  keep  the  masses  bowed  and 
allow  the  preachers  of  "our  manifest  des 
tiny"  to  ride  them  pickaback! 

Each  generation  stands  waiting  the 
apocalyptic  formula,  which  it  fingers  like 
a  favorite  pimple.  No  great  movement  is 
legitimate  until  a  motto  is  stitched  into  the 
minds  of  the  masses. 

"Liberty,     Equality     and     Fraternity," 


HISTORY  69 


"Taxation  without  representation  is  tyr 
anny,"  "Remember  the  Maine,"  "For  God 
and  Fatherland,"  "The  Brotherhood  of 
Man,"  "Onward,  Christian  Soldiers," 
"Making  the  world  safe  for  democracy," 
these  are  a  few  decoy  cries  of  the  Ideal, 
the  eternal  blood-sucker,  the  unsurfeited 
vampire  that  no  atom  is  too  small  to  con 
ceal  and  no  constellation  large  enough  for 
its  traffic. 

Give  me  a  phrase  and  I  will  create  mo 
tion  in  dead  masses.  Give  me  a  warcry  and 
I  will  invent  a  war.  Give  me  an  emblem 
and  I  will  lead  a  people.  Give  me  a  device 
and  I  will  overturn  dynasties.  With  what 
mighty  blustering  epigram  did  Lucifer 
draw  the  rebellious  hosts  up  before  the  face 
of  God?  The  Reformation  began  when 
Luther  tacked  ninety-five  phrases  on  a 
Wittenberg  church-door.  The  millions 
who  have  fallen  in  battle  from  Salamis  to 
Chateau-Thierry  fell  to  perpetuate  maxims, 
and  those  who  survived  were  decorated  with 
medals  and  lived  forever  after  in  the  efful 
gent  light  of  their  favorite  saw. 

There  is  nothing  more  sentimental  than 
war.  History  is  all  sentiment.  To  "create 
new  values"  a  lie  is  necessary — a  senti- 


70  HISTORY 


mental  lie,  a  lie  that  shall  be  strong  enough 
to  found  kingdoms  and  cathedrals,  lazaret 
tos  and  pension  lists,  inquisitions  and 
Reigns  of  Terror.  It  must  be  strong 
enough  to  justify  the  paranoia  of  a  Joan 
of  Arc,  the  epilepsy  of  a  Caesar,  the  sadism 
of  a  Robespierre,  the  sublime  mania  of  a 
Napoleon,  the  pride  of  a  Kaiser,  the  relig 
ious  fervor  of  a  Charles  the  Ninth.  The 
eternal  cant  phrase!  Thy  will  be  done 
here  below  and  may  thy  monstrous  charnel 
houses  top  Arcturus! 

The  socialists  are  right  when  they  say 
the  fundamental  question  is  the  economic 
question.  In  history  the  whimper  of  the 
belly  dominates.  In  all  uprisings  the 
bakeries  are  sacked  first.  The  pinched 
visage  of  Hunger  overawes  the  world.  Food 
is  the  only  God  who  has  never  been  blas 
phemed.  There  are  no  atheists  to  confront 
him. 

Man  can  live  by  bread  alone.  God, 
patriotism,  love,  religion  may  be  spurious. 
Hunger  is  real.  Hunger  is  a  fang.  Thirst 
is  a  thug.  The  billions  who  have  come  out 
of  the  earth  and  have  gone  into  it  were 
all  bellywise.  Kings  and  Popes  fear  the 


HISTORY  71 


mutinies  of  the  Belly  beyond  the  wrath  of 
(Jod.  When  the  people  in  Home  beeame 
restive  the  publie  granaries  were  opened. 
Uehind  all  the  hubbub  of  the  world,  behind 
the  purple  and  the  cloth,  behind  the  cata 
clysms  of  history,  behind  the  mouthings  of 
the  jingo  gods  of  the  masses,  behind  all 
the  painted  scenery  of  civilization  and  bar 
barism  there  stands  the  eternal  breadline. 
It  is  the  skeleton  in  the  closet.  It  is  the 
abominable  Fact.  It  is  the  Banquo's  ghost 
at  the  feast  of  the  masters. 

History  knows  one  Superman:  it  is 
Lazarus.  Against  the  animosity  of  the 
empty  stomach  Reason,  Logic  and  Com 
monsense  art!  mute.  It  justifies  every  crime. 
The  hollow  stomach  is  seditious.  It  is  apos 
tate  to  every  religious,  social  and  ethical 
dogma.  It  is  Anarch  and  Atheist.  All  his 
tory  plays  satellite  to  Stomach. 

Jn  the  beginning  was  the  Helly,  and  the 
Helly  was  with  man,  and  the  Helly  was 
man. 

The  m.-isscs!  the  masses!  That  mighty 
strangled  sigh  that  goes  into  the  infinite! 
The  trillion-eyed  being  who  sees  nothing, 
whose  life  is  nothing,  who  is  just  the  Mass! 


72  HISTORY 


They  manure  the  glory  of  the  great.  They 
drag  the  chariots  of  Charlemagne  and 
Csesar  and  Napoleon  into  the  empyrean 
and  fall  back  into  gaping  graves  below. 

I  have  watched  from  a  star  stricken 
with  ague — a  star  that  was  old  at  the  birth 
of  man  on  the  earth — the  hordes  that  have 
lived  here  in  this  world.  A  meaningless 
generation.  A  useless  fecundity.  A  buf 
foonery  of  nature.  A  flood  of  sap.  The 
stench  of  an  enormous  iniquity.  Will  the 
earth  never  cease  belching!  Behold  the  In 
finite  on  parade!  Behold  the  flaming  gey 
sers  of  life!  The  uncountable,  inscrutable 
masses — pedestals  of  flesh  and  bone  for  the 
8trong  man — skulk  back  to  oblivion,  one 
crawling  over  the  other  ant-wise.  The 
obscene,  gluttonous,  putrescent  trillions — 
the  eruption  of  some  eternal  subhuman 
hell. 

The  masses  are  the  paid  panders  of  those 
notorious  blackguards  called  great  men. 
Their  great  men  are  their  Cloaca  Maxima. 
They  are  the  incarnations  of  their  criminal 
instincts,  the  clearing  houses  of  their  hypoc 
risies. 

The  masses  without  their  heroes!  Incon 
ceivable.  The  average  man  in  every  age 


HISTORY  73 


has  always  been  naturally  a  pimp.  He  is 
the  parasitic  suckling  of  "the  man  of  the 
hour."  His  lips  are  forever  sucking  at  the 
nipple  of  a  demagogue.  The  stars  sparkle, 
the  seas  surge  and  chant  their  magnificent 
litanies  in  his  ears,  the  seasons  blow  their 
aromatic  breaths  into  his  face,  cataracts  of 
light  falling  from  inconceivable  heights 
lave  his  head — of  this  he  sees  nothing.  He 
prefers  to  worship  a  Corsican  blackguard, 
chant  hosannahs  to  a  spectacled  monster 
born  in  Aix,  or  stand  in  mute  adoration 
around  the  eloquent  rump  of  his  economic 
Kaiser. 

And  at  last  the  masses  arrive  at  Democ 
racy!  The  divine  right  of  kings  has  become 
the  divine  right  of  the  masses.  The  crown 
has  been  taken  from  the  head  of  the  ass 
and  glued  on  the  head  of  the  ape.  We  pass 
from  an  assocracy  to  an  apeocracy.  The 
slave  of  five  hundred  million  years  at  last 
comes  to  sit  on  a  latrine  (which  he  mis 
takes  for  a  throne).  The  meaning  of  the 
ages  is  at  last  promulged,  the  Sphinx  gives 
up  its  secret,  we  have  a  clue  to  God,  the 
atom  discloses  its  reason-for-being,  it  is  the 
ninth-month  of  historic  gestation:  the 


74  HISTORY 


masses  are  about  to  take  possession  of  the 
planet. 

Verily  now  the  earth  belongs  to  the  peo 
ple.  But  the  stars  still  belong  to  the  poets. 


THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE 

SPACE  is  the  original  sin;  distance  is 
the  mother  of  desire.  Perspective 
lends  wings  to  the  soul — and  sets  us 
in  the  mud  in  amaze. 

For  we  may  not  fly  to  that  Alpine  ridge 
— nor  to  that  thought  that  beckons  at  the 
end  of  a  mental  perspective. 

Alpine  ridge  and  mental  ridge  are  illu 
sions  of  space,  aerial  promontories  such  as 
we  see  on  the  stage — paint,  cardboard  and 
grease;  beautiful  to  behold,  the  parent 
of  an  aspiration,  but  treacherous  to  land 
on. 

The  pursuit  of  the  spectres  that  inhabit 
distance  brings  us  at  last  to  the  terror  of 
the  Infinite,  to  the  monstrous,  timeless 
thing  we  call  Eternity. 

All  philosophy  is  the  attempt  to  batter 
down  walls,  to  shatter  limitations,  to  reach 
that  utter  distance  called  the  Supreme 
Generalization,  where,  if  the  adventurer 
has  the  real  buccaneer  blood  in  him,  he 
(75) 


76  THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE 

rests  in  eternal  contemplation,  fed  forever 
by  his  immortal  distance  passion. 

Or  if  his  soul  be  not  yet  strong  enough 
he  flies,  like  Pascal,  back  a-trembling  to 
the  skirts  of  the  concrete,  brain-mangled, 
soul-shattered  at  what  he  has  seen,  seeking 
shelter  in  the  pomps  of  the  transitory. 

Philosophers  are  idea-drunkards.  Their 
heady  abstractions — the  rare  vintages,  as  it 
were,  of  all  the  illusions  that  clamber  over 
the  deathless  Spirit  of  Things,  vine  twisted 
around  vine — make  of  them  lords  of  the 
distances,  abolishing  as  they  do,  for  in 
stance,  the  petty  difference  between  an  ant 
and  a  star,  between  summer  and  winter, 
between  the  first  man  and  the  last  man. 

It  is  Nature's  great  paradox  of  distance 
that  a  watery  pulp  like  the  brain — a  mere 
thinking  sponge  that  can  be  held  in  the 
palm  of  the  hand — can  hold  within  itself 
that  stupendous  conception  of  the  evolution 
of  man  from  protoplasm  to  what  he  is;  can 
hold  it  not  only  in  bits  as  scattered  detail, 
but  as  one  single  idea,  to  be  envisaged  in  a 
single  flash  of  consciousness;  an  idea  that 
in  the  drop  of  an  eyelash  destroys  each  in 
dividual  existence  and  solves  everything  in 
a  law  that  sets  all  beginning  and  end  at  de- 


THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE  77 

fiance,  a  law  that  requires  an  eternity  of 
time  in  which  to  body  forth  the  secrets  of 
its  deeps  and  uses  infinite  space  as  its 
mould. 

Approaching  the  monstrous — is  it  not? — 
that  that  little  globe  perched  so  oddly  on 
the  shoulders  of  Arthur  Schopenhauer 
should  have  secreted  within  its  circumfer 
ence  that  marvellous  theory  of  the  Will- — a 
menstruum  that  before  our  very  eyes  va 
porizes  a  late  substantial  universe  and  sets 
the  mind  a-rocking  and  a-reeling  in  the 
limitless.  Sublime  paradox  indeed! — the 
paradox  of  paradoxes.  For  here  the  lesser 
holds  the  greater,  the  unlimited  is  found 
secreted  in  the  limited,  the  infinite  in  a  skull ! 

The  Hindu  seer  travelling  his  upward 
Path  rises  from  prospect  to  prospect  with 
a  rapt  joy  blazoned  on  his  soul,  indulging 
that  passion  of  distance,  that  frenetic  desire 
to  be  lost  in  the  Infinite,  to  be  hub  to  a 
million  prospects,  to  be  the  vent  of  Time 
and  Space. 

The  yogi  is  the  divine  intoxicant,  an 
eater  of  form  and  matter.  His  hasheesh 
is  distance;  his  ultimate  the  complete  ab 
sorption  of  himself  in  a  buoyant,  spaceless, 
timeless,  shelterless  Nirvana,  where  dis- 


78  THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE 

tance  has  consumed  distance,  and  where  at 
last  there  remains  only  the  extensionless 
Now, 

Amiel,  who  like  Pascal,  was  touched — 
one  may  only  be  touched  by  it  to  retain  his 
sanity — by  this  passion  for  endlessness, 
was  transfixed  into  a  lifelong  inaction. 

The  Infinite  had  petrified  him.  His  pas 
sion  for  distance  ended  in  a  passion  for 
death,  an  ineradicable  longing  to  escape 
from  the  net  of  this  and  that,  from  the  dull 
mummeries  of  change,  the  tawdry  pag 
eantry  of  earth. 

The  average  person  holds  fast  to  the 
limited.  The  boundaries  of  the  territory  in 
which  he  strolls — for  the  average  man  never 
wanders — are  as  clearly  marked  out  for 
him  as  the  streets  of  his  native  town.  He 
ambles  through  life  the  smiling  prisoner 
of  use-and-wont,  chilled  by  the  unfamiliar, 
the  scarcely  manumitted  child  of  the  cos 
mic  nurseries.  He  travels  unsuspectingly 
the  well-worn  grooves  of  sense,  his  mind 
seldom  expanding  beyond  the  tip  of  the 
nose  or  the  nerve-centre  of  the  longest 
finger.  He  feels  well-housed,  safe  in  the 
concrete,  in  the  very  real  walls  of  his  men 
tal  abode,  surrounded  by  his  imperishable 


THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE  79 

lares  and  penates — with  his  unchanging  God 
of  sundries  in  back  of  it  all. 

The  thought  never  enters  his  mind  that 
that  which  he  most  firmly  clutches  has  no 
more  reality  than  fountain  spray,  is,  in  fact, 
a  kind  of  coarsened  ether — an  equilibration 
for  a  little  while  of  imponderable  force; 
that  the  object  most  familiar  to  him  is 
nothing  but  an  externalized  state  of  con 
sciousness,  a  thing  of  no-name  really,  only 
dubbed  "tree"  or  "house"  or  "chair"  or 
"woman"  as  a  kind  of  makeshift  for  our 
unalterable  ignorance. 

Still,  this  stands — this  Thing  of  no-name 
— in  an  infinite  number  of  relations  to  an 
infinite  number  of  other  things,  capable  of 
an  infinite  number  of  destinies,  with  abysm 
on  abysm  beneath  it  and  incommensurable 
distances  ramifying  in  every  direction  from 
it. 

And  yet  on  a  day — a  day  ticked  off, 
maybe,  on  his  mental  calendar;  or,  not  un 
derstanding,  left  slide  by,  hardly  noted — 
this  "average  person,"  standing  for  a  mo 
ment  on  a  mountain  top  or  casting  a 
glance  out  to  sea  or  unconcernedly  tossing 
his  eye  deep  into  the  blue  illusion  over  his 
head,  is  aware  of  a  swift  inquiet,  a  sudden 


80  THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE 

arrest  of  being,  a  falling  sensation  such 
as.  he  may  have  experienced  in  a  nightmare. 
He  has  a  vague  glimpse  of  something  that 
can  only  be  described  as  the  Nothing- 
EveryMng.  Then  he  comes  back  in  his 
body  again,  sound,  safe,  with  a  grip  of 
death  upon  his  world  of  thick  cubes  and 
gravitating  chattels. 

He  does  not  know  exactly  what  hap 
pened,  but  half -guesses  that  his  soul  had 
been  shot  some  distance  out  of  his  body — 
or  that  his  body  had  been  suddenly  shot 
from  under  his  soul. 

The  absorptive,  annihilating  Infinite — 
abstract  of  all  distances — had  for  an  in 
calculably  small  space  of  time  swept  him 
away  bag  and  baggage.  The  eye  of  his 
soul  had  caught  for  a  moment  on  its  retina 
a  picture  of  the  perdurable. 

There  are  some  faces  that  intoxicate  us 
with  the  illimitable  prospects  they  open 
up;  faces  that  limn  interstellar  distances; 
far-away  faces,  space-hallucinated,  object- 
blind — the  forehead  and  eye  recording  so 
expressively  the  vertiginous  flights  of  the 
soul. 

Here,  too,  in  these  faces  there  is  always 
a  touch  of  the  wistful,  such  a  look  as  we 


THE  PASSION  OF  DISTANCE  81 

see  on  the  faces  of  those  who  gaze  expect 
antly  out  to  sea  the  day  long;  a  touch  of 
nostalgia. 

Be  we  ever  so  near  to  these  beings  they 
are  still,  we  feel,  so  far  away  really  that 
contact  with  them  gives  us  back  something 
of  the  uncanny. 

They  bear  the  air  of  one  sent  on  a 
strange,  perplexing  errand  by  a  malign 
god.  They  have  about  them  a  vague  pres 
age  of  the  ultimate  destiny  of  the  soul, 
which  seeks  in  each  movement,  however 
trivial,  the  secret  of  that  last  unification, 
that  ultimate  redemption  within  itself  of 
all  distances,  the  final  reclamation  of  all 
horizons — and  the  meaning  thereof. 


THE  COMIC  VIEW 

THE  comic  is  Dissonance  viewed  from 
the  Imperturbable.  Life  is  a  con 
tretemps.  Life  is  an  encounter  be 
tween  I  Would  and  Thou  Shalt  Not.  Life 
is  Mind  out  for  a  lark.  Life  is  what  you 
will,  but  the  hiatus  between  what  you  will 
and  what  you  do  not  get  is  the  great  motive 
for  the  humorous  in  art,  literature  and  the 
magazines. 

Spencer  says  laughter  is  caused  by  a  "de 
scending  incongruity."  In  plain  English, 
a  "descending  incongruity"  is  an  un 
expected  tumble.  Man  describing  a  para 
bola  as  he  slips  up  on  the  banana  peel  of 
Chance  is  the  cause  of  that  inextinguish 
able  laughter  that  reverberates  from  Olym 
pus  to  Broadway. 

George  Meredith  tells  us  that  the  comic 
is  the  laughter  of  the  Reason.  And  reason, 
he  might  have  added,  is  the  laughter  of  the 
Emotions. 

The  smile  is  the  scintillant  light  that 
(82) 


THE  COMIC  VIEW 83 

sparkles  on  the  tear.  The  comic  is  the 
tragic  viewed  from  the  wings.  Humor 
is  the  tabasco  sauce  that  gives  life  a  flavor. 
It  is  mirth  that  keeps  us  sane. 

The  tragic  is  ridiculous  because  it  has  no 
sense  of  proportion.  The  Tragic  View 
measures  man  against  man.  The  Comic 
View  measures  man  against  the  universe. 
One  records  the  collisions  of  personality. 
The  other  records  the  impact  of  the  mis 
chievous  molecule  against  the  irrevocable. 

The  Tragic  View  is  defective  because 
it  takes  itself  seriously  and  bombards  etern 
ity  with  its  whimperings.  The  Comic  View 
is  perfect  because  it  takes  nothing  seriously, 
chucks  the  menacing  to  devouring  Time, 
and  impales  the  Inevitable  on  a  smile. 

The  Comic  View  is  exhilarating.  It 
mounts  the  barricades  of  limitation  with  a 
hop-skip-and-a-jump.  It  knows  the  value 
of  all  things.  Science?  Mere  mumblings 
in  a  vacuum.  Life?  A  parenthetical  affir 
mative  between  two  negatives.  Honor?  A 
bauble  for  idealists.  Love?  Vascular  ex 
citation.  Morality?  A  clever  device  of  the 
first  impostor — the  State.  Tra-la! 

Hoop-la!  Hold  up  your  paper  hoops, 
Master  of  Ceremonies,  and  see  Merry- 


84 THE  COMIC  VIEW 

andrew  dive  through  them  and  slit  them 
into  shreds. 

The  Comic  View  is  the  cosmic  view.  The 
world  of  time  and  chance  is  meaningless. 
The  Demiurge,  the  world-creator,  is  the 
Browning  of  celestial  mechanics:  style 
without  ideas.  The  world  is  chaos  drama 
tized.  The  earth  is  the  Farnese  torso  among 
the  scuptured  planets.  Life  is  a  problem 
in  contingencies.  Nothing  eventuates.  Ac 
tions  are  webbed  nothings  spun  by  a  Syn 
copated  Spider.  Time  is  a  loafer  playing 
at  tenpins.  And  whether  you  drink,  or 
sleep,  or  make  wry  faces  at  Demigorgon, 
or  shy  spitballs  at  Fate — it  is  all  the  same. 
You  dissolve  at  last  in  fine  smut. 

So  get  the  Cosmic-Comic  View  before 
you  slough  off  and  snuff  out.  Peep  at 
yourself  en  passant.  Look  at  your  mean 
ingless  gyrations  and  silly  circumvolutions 
from  a  perspective.  Stop  your  sulking  and 
come  up  to  Pike's  Peak.  Sitting  recumbent 
in  your  stews,  you  taint  the  air.  Your 
disappointments  are  bacterial.  You  litter 
the  things  that  devour  you.  Your  sighs 
are  miasmatic.  Your  liver  has  got  in  your 
eye  and  your  heart  in  your  boots.  Get 
flush  with  the  Spirit  that  abides. 


THE  COMIC  VIEW 85 

The  raucous  guffaw  of  Rabelais  rever 
berates  to  this  day.  The  silvery  rill  of 
Cervantes — who  dragged  Prometheus  from 
his  rock  and  set  him  tilting  at  windmills — 
is  Spain's  immortal  contribution  to  the 
Comic  View.  The  dry  smile  of  Moliere 
lingers  on  French  letters.  The  metallic 
chuckle  of  Mephisto — I  believe  it  was  his 
chuckle  that  saved  Faust!  And  even  the 
sardonic  grin  of  Aristophanes  is  as  broad 
today  as  it  was  when  it  first  split  his  face. 

These  are  the  wondrous  mirrors  that 
image  the  human  contretemps  and  flash  back 
our  calamitous  comicalities.  Here  man 
kind  is  skewered  on  the  poignant  wit  of 
genius.  Could  we  read  Balzac  at  a  single 
sitting  the  best  of  us  would  forever  re 
nounce  life.  How  grotesque  are  our  days! 
How  aimless  our  actions!  How  petty  our 
passions!  The  "Comedie  Humaine"  is  a 
picture  of  a  huge  animal  chasing  its  tail. 

Louis  Lambert  mistook  the  cataleptic 
trance  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven!  Pere 
Goriot  gave  up  all  for  love  and  died  of 
starvation!  Old  Grandet  desired  gold  and 
wallowed  in  it;  his  daughter  Eugenie  de 
sired  love  and  died  a  pallid  virgin.  And 
yet  Lowell  says,  "God  may  be  had  for  the 


86 THE  COMIC  VIEW 

asking!"  Balzac  knew  better:  It  is  the 
gods  who  may  be  had  for  the  asking. 

Man  darts  out  of  negation  and  begins 
to  scratch  the  ground  like  a  chicken  out 
of  the  egg.  With  what  care  he  builds  the 
house  of  life!  With  what  seriousness  and 
pride  he  goes  about  his  daily  tasks!  He 
begins  each  day  at  exactly  the  same  place 
he  began  the  day  before.  But  being  serious, 
he  lacks  omniscience.  He  builds  as  though 
it  were  for  eternity,  as  though  Death — the 
joker  in  the  stacked  pack — did  not  lie  in 
wait  for  him.  His  house  is  suspended  in 
air,  and  for  every  brick  he  puts  on  the  edi 
fice  a  brick  at  the  bottom  drops  silently 
into  space.  He  is  a  mechanical  figure  mov 
ing  on  a  grooved  stage  between  the  right 
wing  of  Despair  and  the  left  wing  of  Ennui. 
His  spiritual  tympanum  has  been  destroyed 
in  the  great  Boiler  Factory.  Else  he  would 
renounce  and  smile. 

To  reach  the  comic  height  you  traverse 
the  Valley  of  the  Shadow.  The  Country 
of  the  White  Lights  is  reached  only  through 
the  Land  of  Ultra- Violet  Despairs.  You 
first  wander  through  the  pits  of  implacable 
negations  and  beneath  sickly,  pitted  suns, 
and  keep  tryst  with  Succubus. 


THE  COMIC  VIEW 87 

The  pinnacle  of  the  ludicrous  is  attained 
only  after  having  won  all  sorts  of  nasty 
opinions  of  yourself.  The  little  peeping 
double  on  high  is  evolved  in  travail.  In 
early  life  our  theories  of  personality  are 
geocentric  and  our  social  universe  is  Ptole 
maic.  On  our  dear  tear-mildewed  souls  we 
mirror  the  earth  and  the  fatness  thereof. 
Everything  revolves  around  us.  The  Self 
is  garbed  as  Hamlet.  What  eyes  behold  us ! 
How  our  every  action  is  recorded!  We 
manufacture  utterly  absurd  moral  systems 
that  we  imagine  others  think  we  ought  to 
live  up  to.  We  shed  oceans  of  tears  be 
cause  ourself  doesn't  like  ourself .  The  very 
stars  we  believe  to  be  spy-glasses  pointed 
straight  at  our  mewling  and  puking  souls. 
Oh,  the  agonies  of  the  self-conscious — the 
parturition  of  self  from  self!  Ego,  like 
protozoon,  multiplies  by  fission.  Each  new 
thought  is  born  with  the  evil  eye. 

But  sudden  on  a  day  the  black  garb  is 
doffed — we  know  not  how.  Tears  cease  to 
flow,  and  the  sob  ends  in  a  squeak.  We 
are  aware  of  a  synthesis,  an  amalgamation, 
a  blending  as  of  many  waters. 

It  is  the  miracle  of  perspective.  What 
was  all  this  pother  about?  Who  is  this 


88 THE  COMIC  VIEW _____ 

blubberer?  I  turn  aside,  watch  myself  come 
and  go,  and  now  smile  indulgently  at  my 
antics.  Funny  little  fellow,  you  there — erst 
myself — with  your  labors  and  loves  and 
mouthings!  Hi,  little  fellow  there,  come 
amuse  me;  give  me  a  jest  or  break  a  bottle 
with  me;  sing  me  a  funny  woe-begone 
serenade  beneath  Dolores'  window;  or  let 
me  see  your  funny  little  legs  sprint  to  the 
tomb.  Hey  there,  little  mannikin  that  once 
I  thought  a  giant  Thor,  what  deviltry  will 
you  be  up  to  tomorrow? 

There  is  a  wail  in  the  night.  A  babe  is 
crying  for  the  moon.  The  wail  has  ceased; 
the  babe  has  cried  itself  to  sleep.  This  is 
often  called  renunciation.  But  the  Comic 
Self  on  high  smiles.  He  knows. 


THE  ARTIST 

THE  artist! 
He  garners  the  world  in  a  dream,  and 
lo !  the  dream  is  more  real  than  reality ; 
he  touches  the  dead  and  they  tremble  back 
into  life  and  are  more  vital  than  the  merely 
galvanized  beings  that  stare  at  you  in  the 
street;  his  brain  is  fecund  of  worlds,  of  real 
men  and  women,  systems  and  great  cosmic 
dramas. 

What  you  see,  what  you  feel  is  not  real; 
only  feeling  and  seeing  and  understanding 
are  the  immortal  realities.  The  mind  in 
corporates  the  world,  and  what  the  artist 
gives  forth  is  Chaos  transfigured,  turmoil 
stilled  in  its  frenzies,  the  old  foolish  ges 
tures  called  action  transfixed  on  an  Idea. 
The  difference  between  art  and  life  is 
the  difference  between  reality  and  a  mir 
ror — art  being  the  reality,  life  the  mirror. 
Art  is  the  reality  because  it  is  the  exact 
record  of  what  we  feel  and  know,  of  what 
we  aspire  to  be,  of  the  ideal — hence  real — 
(89) 


90  THE  ARTIST 


self -enactment.  Life  is  only  a  faint  reflec 
tion  of  our  desires,  and  so  the  poet,  the 
painter,  the  dreamer  as  men  are  ghosts, 
mere  flesh-films;  but  their  poems  and  their 
pictures  and  their  abstractions  are  the 
highest  reality.  Our  ideals  and  our  in 
stincts  are  our  standards;  and  in  a  book, 
a  poem,  a  picture,  a  statue,  these  ideals 
and  instincts  live  to  their  fulness. 

Life  wakes  only  our  caricatures;  art 
wakes  the  spiritual  protagonist  complete, 
substantial,  sempiternal. 

Art  takes  life  for  its  theme.  Life  has 
no  theme.  Practical  life  is  aimless;  it  is 
the  reel  of  a  homeless,  drunken  man.  It  is 
detail,  detail,  detail,  infinitely  spread.  Our 
acts  are  stop-gaps  between  moments  of 
painful  disillusion  —  mud-floundering  at 
their  best.  The  artistic  spirit  constructs 
ends;  having  attained  them,  it  rests,  a 
marbled,  immortal  contemplation.  It  dwells 
in  an  everlasting  Now,  and  has  the  power 
to  hallow  smut  and  aureole  the  beast. 

My  vision!  Who  can  take  that  from  me? 
My  impassioned  dream  that  burst  my 
brain-dikes  and  overflowed  on  to  canvas, 
that  forced  the  marble  block  to  yield  its 
curved  secrets,  or  that  flashed  on  paper  as 


THE  ARTIST  91 


a  rhapsody — that  is  the  real  moment,  over 
against  which  the  seething  caldron  of  muti 
lations  we  call  the  "great  world"  has  only 
that  validity  for  being  that  a  fertilizer  has. 

The  particular  seen  as  a  particular  has 
no  meaning.  No  man  can  understand  any 
thing  until  he  thinks  abstractly.  The  differ 
ence  between  the  breed  of  slugs  that  move 
from  point  to  point,  from  fact  to  fact, 
feeling  their  way  like  a  snout  along  a  dung 
hill,  and  the  godlike  apprehension  of  the 
great  creative  artist  is  not  a  difference  in 
degree  but  a  difference  in  kind  of  brain- 
stuff.  The  mental  difference  between  the 
Black  Fellow  and  the  anthropoid  ape  is 
not  as  great  as  the  mental  difference  be 
tween  a  plantation  darky  and  Henry  James. 

Life  is  mean  and  petty  to  most  people 
because  they  lack  the  artistic  instinct.  They 
see  John  and  James,  and  they  are  com 
monplace.  But  read  of  John  and  James 
as  Balzac  saw  them  or  a  boor  as  Thomas 
Hardy  saw  him  and  the  scales  have  fallen 
from  your  eyes.  The  finite  has  no  longer 
any  existence  as  such;  the  individual  has 
ceased  to  be  an  individual:  the  man  be 
comes  a  type;  an  abstraction  made  flesh — 
or  breathing  flesh  become  an  abstraction; 


92  THE  ARTIST 


an  insulated  force;  a  concourse  of  ideas; 
an  entombed  universe. 

It  is  this  exaltation  of  consciousness — 
this  challenge  to  the  commonplace,  this  war 
of  the  Idea  on  the  tyranny  of  the  senses 
that  would  cudgel  the  soul  to  an  abject  sub 
servience — that  constitutes  the  superiority 
of  the  art-instinct  over  the  life-instinct. 
That  which  we  touch  too  often  is  either 
destroyed  by  us  or  destroys  us.  The  habit 
ual  kills  wonder  and  familiarity  slays  awe. 
The  Alps  guide  has  no  sense  of  the  gran 
deur  and  mystery  which  surround  him; 
the  astronomer  sweeps  the  constellations 
nightly  with  his  telescope  and  soon  he 
dwindles  to  an  automatic  calculating  ma 
chine.  And  the  crowds  of  the  pavement 
have  no  eye  for  the  sublime.  Did  not  the 
sun  and  moon  rise  yesterday?  And  Venus 
in  her  brilliance  is  only  "pretty." 

Walt  Whitman  one  day  crossed  over  to 
Brooklyn  on  a  ferryboat.  Years  after  he 
wrote  a  poem  called  "Crossing  Brooklyn 
Ferry,"  and  all  who  now  read  that  poem 
want  to  cross  the  river  and  see  the  sky,  the 
boat,  the  gulls,  the  deck-hands  as  Old  Walt 
saw  them. 

The  great  artist  is  a  seer;  he  stands  out- 


THE  ARTIST  93 


side  of  the  world.  The  human  race  fills 
in  a  perspective.  The  creative  dreamer 
is  sundered  from  environment — he  is  his 
own  milieu — he  is  brain-light,  detached  cell- 
ecstasy.  He  beholds  the  endless  procession 
into  being  from  out  of  the  womb  of  nonen 
tity,  and  etherealizes  God  and  diatom.  The 
writhing,  pain-gutted  phantoms  called  men 
are  the  Epic  of  Evil,  an  epic  of  the  artist's 
creation.  He  alone  is  likest  God. 

Whether  we  writhe  in  the  strait  jacket 
of  pain  or  are  solved  in  the  radiant  monot 
ony  of  a  transcendent  Perfection;  whether 
we  have  flouted  all  the  seductive  but  venge 
ful  sanctities  in  our  effort  to  preserve  the 
greater  sanctity — self — whether  we  have 
challenged  all  the  wooden  deities  of  time 
and  reviled  the  Arch-Bungler  each  day — 
these  things  which  we  have  done  or  have 
not  done  are  significant  but  seldom  of 
practical  importance.  The  creative  intel 
lect  looks  down  upon  himself  and  draws 
the  essential  facts  out  of  its  experiences 
and  fashions  them  into  images. 

The  artistic  temperament  is  the  philo 
sophic  temperament,  and  good  and  evil  and 
the  codified  cant  called  the  moralities  are 
the  clay  with  which  the  creative  dreamer 


94  THE  ARTIST 


works;  they  have  no  other  use.  If  a  "sin" 
yield  me  truth  or  beauty  it  is  no  longer 
a  sin.  But  this  privilege  belongs  only  to 
the  strong.  Weakness  is  the  preroga 
tive  of  power  —  only  the  strong  man 
can  afford  to  transgress.  Before  he  falls  he 
knows  he  will  be  up  again.  He  never  loses 
his  strength.  The  great  soul — the  self- 
centered  artistic  temperament — thrives  on 
his  poisons,  because  to  him  they  are  not 
poisons.  He  would  not  always  be  with  the 
Highest  because  his  Highest  alone  is  sure. 
The  transgressions  of  the  weak  have  no 
ideality  in  them.  The  weak,  in  reality, 
never  transgress;  they  merely  lapse. 

Nietzsche,  Ibsen,  D'Annunzio,  Whitman! 
— four  great  storm  petrels  of  the  Inland 
Sea,  workers  in  the  Time-Mist,  somber 
heralds  of  dawn — or  night.  Their  dreams 
are  sublime  futilities,  but  dreams  that 
swaddle  us  in  an  aura  of  godhood.  Could 
the  crowd  grasp  them,  could  the  world 
enact  in  its  drab,  vulgar  way  the  passion- 
glozed  hallucinations  that  are  blown  from 
the  skulls  of  these  men,  life  would  lose  its 
flavor,  ideal  transgression  its  fascination, 
and  evil  and  good  their  aesthetic  value. 

Only     ideal     transgressions     are     worth 


THE  ARTIST  95 


while;  action  is  comic.  What  the  gods  wish 
to  destroy  they  first  make  real.  Were  we 
all  Hamlets,  lagos  and  Lears  no  one  would 
read  Shakespeare. 

Give  us  our  immortal  dreams,  show  us 
ourselves  as  we  are  not,  give  us  the  riot  of 
our  anarch  minds ;  foil  us,  foil,  us,  eternally 
foil  us,  that  we  may  dream  again!  Let  the 
scavengers  scrape  the  gutters  for  coppers 
and  duck  in  the  mud  for  dimes.  They  are 
the  "Captains  of  Industry" — the  grimy, 
smutty  captains  of  the  marts  and  their 
"industry"  a  grimy,  smutty,  lurid  hell. 

Philosophers  are  artists  in  ideas.  They 
are  the  white  heralds  of  the  Great  Release, 
eagles  of  the  Infinite;  they  solve  the  iron 
thong  of  earthly  limitations  in  a  molten 
white  idea,  and  walk  not  on  terra  firma. 
The  creative  philosopher  seems  in  his 
highest  flights  to  dam  the  eternal  flux  and 
in  his  widest  generalizations  to  erase  acci 
dent.  In  Time  under  protest,  he  stands 
equipped  for  eternity,  and  his  calamities 
are  his  foods.  The  abstract  mind  flows  into 
the  matrices  of  the  concrete  and  changes 
the  shape  of  the  moulds.  It  hoods  itself 
under  all  forms,  but  is  none  of  these.  It  is 
that  which  perceives,  but  is  never  perceiv- 


96  THE  ARTIST 


able.  It  sucks  from  a  world  of  illusive  ap 
pearances  the  marrow  of  reality,  and  spits 
whole  epochs  of  social  movement  upon  the 
gleaming  point  of  a  generalization.  The 
philosophic  mind  of  the  first  order  packs 
all  of  history,  with  its  crescendos  and  de- 
crescendos  of  joy  and  woe,  its  evanishings 
and  recrudescences,  under  a  single  scalp, 
and  finds  in  the  perversities,  aspirations, 
meannesses  and  cruelties  of  a  single  soul 
the  history  of  mankind  in  action. 

There  lies  in  each  soul  a  history  of  the 
universe ;  indeed,  the  soul  of  each  is  nothing 
but  embryo  and  cadaver — the  new  spring 
ing  from  the  old,  life  springing  from  death. 
Each  impulse  to  action  is  a  ghost  seeking 
flesh  again,  some  old  dead  ancestral  self, 
scenting  from  its  arterial  prison-house  its 
ancient  loves.  Within  the  recesses  of  your 
clay,  mewed  in  brain-cell  or  aorta,  there 
live  Charlemagne,  Christ,  Peter  the  Hermit, 
Nero,  Judas,  St.  Francis  of  Assisi  and 
Shelley.  Your  temptations,  your  betrayals, 
your  cruelties,  your  asceticisms,  your 
penances,  your  will-to-power,  your  "cry  for 
light,"  your  lusts — that  is  history,  and  it 
needs  not  Gibbon  in  six  ponderous  tomes 
to  tell  me  why  Rome  decayed.  The  poison 


THE  ARTIST  97 


that  killed  Rome  is  in  me,  and  the  fate  of 
America  I  can  forecast  in  a  study  of  my 
own  strengths  and  weaknesses.  The  Law 
works  everywhere.  It  is  the  one  single 
reality.  It  is  the  immovable  screen  against 
which  Time  projects  her  endless  shapes. 

The  commonest  objects  have  this  in  com 
mon  with  the  sublimest  spectacles  which 
nature  or  man  offers:  they  are  at  bottom 
but  phantoms  of  the  brain,  modes  of 
cellular  life.  Children  and  geniuses  bear 
on  their  faces  a  look  of  exalted  wonder. 
That  mingled  expression  of  perplexity, 
awe,  amazement  on  the  face  of  a  child  when 
fingering  a  button  on  your  coat  differs  only 
in  degree  from  the  feeling  in  the  poet's  soul 
when  for  the  first  time  he  sees  Mont  Blanc. 
The  same  feeling  of  wonder  overcomes  the 
philosopher  when,  step  by  step,  he  has 
tracked  the  variegated  universe  back  to  an 
impalpable,  eternally  persisting  Force.  A 
touch  of  the  soul  melts  solids  to  fluids,  and 
a  flash  of  insight  in  the  brain  of  man  dis 
covers  to  him  the  great  cosmic  cataracts — 
and  we  humans  the  perpetually  evanescing 
debris  on  their  surfaces. 

We  are  travelling  toward  the  zenith  of 
Self,  and  all  great  art  is  a  report  of  the 


98  THE  ARTIST 


progress  made.  Action  is  only  valuable 
because  it  engenders  reaction;  because  it 
shocks  the  brain  to  thought  and  moulds 
the  soul  to  pictured  moods  which  seek  ex 
pression.  The  shocks,  the  moods,  the  visions 
are  real;  the  objects  that  caused  them  are 
brain  data. 

The  world  is  my  dream,  but  I  the 
Dreamer  am  everlastingly,  else  I  could  not 
say  "It  is  a  dream." 


UNDER  A  MASK 

THE  right  to  live  implies  theft.  If 
you  cannot  take,  you  cannot  live. 
Seizing  and  assimilating  to  one's 
needs  the  things  that  lie  about  us  are  pri 
mary  notions.  There  is  no  law  that  sets  a 
bound  to  any  special  manifestation  of  the 
law  of  acquisitiveness  except  another  and 
opposing  special  manifestation  of  the  same 
law.  In  organized  society  we  pillage  under 
prescribed  conditions,  plunder  within  limits; 
what  we  call  social  justice  is  merely  the 
machinery  by  which  we  regulate  theft. 

The  eternal  combat  waged  between  the 
House  of  Have  and  the  House  of  Want — 
that  is,  between  ability  and  inability — is  the 
clash  of  gigantic  forces  which  lie  in  the 
nature  of  things,  so  far  as  we  know  them. 
It  is  true,  indeed,  that  the  combatants 
drape  their  nakedness  in  all  manner  of 
gaudy  apparel  and  that  they  fly  beautiful 
home-made  banners  with  little  touch-and-go 
ethical  mottoes;  but  these  romantic  trap- 
(99) 


100 UNDER  A  MASK 

pings  please  the  stay-at-homes  mostly — the 
drowsy  Utopians,  with  their  ideals  of  lazi 
ness  which  they,  again,  with  that  incurable 
idealizing  instinct  of  theirs,  nickname  self- 
development. 

"All  property  is  robbery" — that  is  the 
reason  why  we  hold  all  property  to  be 
sacred.  What  I  possess  I  have  wrested 
from  some  weaker  being  by  superior 
strength  or  craft  or  subterfuge,  or  under 
the  patronage  of  some  legal  lie.  The 
effort  involved,  this  final  appropriation  of 
a  thing  after  a  life-and-death  struggle  in 
which  all  the  life -forces  are  engaged — this 
is  what  gives  value  to  property  and 
apotheosizes  it  in  our  eyes. 

"All  property  is  robbery" — that  is  abso 
lutely  true,  but  to  say  that  robbery  is  an 
evil  is  false.  Who  will  probe  the  subtleties 
of  theft  in  organized  society?  Who  dare 
trace  his  smallest  possession  to  its  begin 
nings?  All  the  things  we  own  are  smeared 
with  blood  and  tears,  and  our  triumphal 
marches  are  over  the  skeletons  of  the  lost. 
Each  one  takes  what  he  must;  each  takes 
what  he  dares  to  take;  he  calls  it  the  "self- 
preservative  right,"  ignoring  the  implica 
tions  of  the  phrase.  For  the  right  to  pre- 


UNDER  A  MASK 101 

serve  one's  self  carries  with  it  the  right  to 
slay  and  steal  until  the  self  be  perfectly 
balanced  with  its  own  youthful  dreams  of 
well-being. 

In  the  last  analysis,  all  law  and  custom 
exist  to  safeguard  and  benefit  the  individual, 
who  is  the  race-unit,  the  ultimate  appraiser 
of  all  values.  There  is  no  such  thing  as 
"the  common  good,"  for  there  is  no  good 
common  to  all.  "Perpetuity  of  the  race" 
is  inconceivable  unless  the  well-being  of  the 
individual  is  conserved.  Thus  we  have  the 
paradox:  Government,  in  the  name  of  the 
"common  good,"  destroying  the  units  of 
which  it  is  composed.  Society  is  an  ab 
straction  that  has  got  itself  organized.  It 
"safeguards"  the  rights  of  the  individuals 
by  taking  away  his  rights  and  makes  him 
"upright"  by  clamping  him  in  a  strait- 
jacket.  Like  most  romantics,  the  State  is 
totally  devoid  of  humor. 

Who  bound  me  to  follow  "social  ends"? 
Where  did  I  precontract  to  labor  and  sweat 
for  the  "common  good"? — to  offend  my 
self  by  feeding  it  with  ill-smelling  phrases 
when  it  sickens  for  a  life  that  lives,  a  voy 
age  against  the  stars,  or  into  hell  if  so  I 
please? 


102 UNDER  A  MASK 

The  ideal  of  good  citizenship  is  the  philo 
sophy  of  servants.  They  pass  and  repass 
before  themselves — the  herd;  they  pass  and 
repass  before  their  heaven-created  State 
like  a  fop  before  his  mirror — admiring, 
smirking,  titillating  themselves  with  their 
own  magnified  image.  Their  slogan  is 
Progress  and  their  problem:  How  may  we 
become  smaller?  Of  growth  they  know 
nothing — growth,  which  is  to  pass  beyond 
yourself,  you  the  individual,  you  the  iso 
lated  one.  Leave  the  flock,  outlaw  yourself, 
you  will  be  original  and  immoral;  for  all 
originality  is  "immoral." 

The  weak  panoply  themselves  in  codes 
and  systems.  It  is  their  slowly  evolved 
organ  of  defense  against  the  strong — a  spe 
cies  of  vengeance,  urged  of  course  in  the 
name  of  justice.  How  may  I  survive? 
asks  the  weak  man.  Organize  the  State 
and  plunder  the  strong,  whispers  his  con 
science.  All  popular  uprisings  are  attempts 
to  impose  upon  the  strong  the  very  yoke 
which  the  weak  are  trying  to  cast  off — the 
yoke  of  slavery.  The  slogan  is  always 
"justice";  the  secret  intent  is  revenge;  the 
result  is  triumphant  incapacity.  The  strong 
man's  justice  is  always  justice — that  is, 


UNDER  A  MASK 103 

three  parts  of  the  cloak  for  himself  and  the 
remaining  part  for  the  beggar.  The  weak 
man's  justice  is  only  equality — a  phrase 
that  corresponds  to  nothing  but  the  letters 
that  compose  it. 

Communities  —  cities,  countries  —  what 
signify  all  these  various  forms  of  herding — 
this  formal  amalgamation  of  Custom's 
slaves — against  extraordinary  states  of 
consciousness  in  a  few  chosen  individuals? 
'Till  the  seer  and  the  prophet  and  teller  of 
news  comes,  accoutred  in  rebel  garb,  life 
has  no  significance.  Life  is  merely  the  irk 
of  a  long  sombre  day,  a  crouching  in  a  dingy 
corner  of  the  universe  listening  with  bated 
breath  to  the  long-reiterant  menace  of 
death,  a  parley  with  the  unseen,  eyeless  ills 
crouching  bellywise  by  our  sides — 'till  the 
challenger  comes,  he  who  augments  Fate 
with  a  larger  destiny — and  goes  to  his 
Calvary.  Out  of  the  commonplace  rises  the 
interpreter  of  the  commonplace;  forth  from 
organized  government  comes  the  unorgan 
ized  rebel. 

The  outlawed  being  may  offend  aesthet 
ically,  but  he  cannot  offend  morally;  what 
he  does  may  not  be  beautiful,  but  it  cannot 
be  wrong.  He  may  bungle  the  scheme,  be 


104 UNDER  A  MASK 

clumsy  and  awkward,  build  himself  un- 
mathematically ;  but  if  he  is  sincere  he  can 
not  be  wrong ;  [self -fulfilment  is  the  only 
moral  law.  The  thing  that  I  must  do  is 
always  right. j  Evil  treads  the  same  path  as 
goodness,  but  it  goes  further;  it  is  the  un 
curbed,  the  unleashed,  the  uncalculating, 
and,  always  dazzling  the  imaginations  of 
men,  is  worshipped  as  power  under  various 
guises;  it  even  taking  the  garb  of  humility. 
There  are  no  bad  men;  there  are  only 
men  who  affect  us  badly;  men  who  reject 
our  way  to  felicity;  who  will  have  none  of 
our  blessed  state.  "Sweetness  and  light" 
are  bitterness  and  darkness  to  a  nature  that 
finds  delight  in  danger,  war,  depredation. 
Cain  did  boldly,  in  the  full  light  of  day, 
what  Abel  would  probably  have  done  from 
the  thicket,  for  Abel  was  heaven's  first 
sycophant;  Cain,  earth's  first  man  who 
dared.  Cain  stood  upon  the  dignity  of  his 
soul.  Abel  was  the  forerunner  of  those 
who  perpetrated  all  the  conceivable  devil 
tries  which  the  mob-soul  is  heir  to  for  the 
"glory  of  God" — a  justification  which  to 
day  steals  among  us  under  a  new  mask, 
"the  welfare  of  the  race."  The  criminal — 
so  called — preys  upon  Society  in  the  name 


UNDER  A  MASK 105 

of  his  instincts;  Society  preys  upon  the 
criminal — so  called — in  the  name  of  an  ab 
straction.  The  State,  once  anointed  of 
heaven,  has  now  become  the  anointed  of 
man,  and  those  who  were  formerly  of  God 
are  now  the  lobbyists  of  the  Summum 
Bonum. 

The  strong  man  seeks  out  evil;  the  weak 
man  is  sought  out  by  evil  The  doctrine 
of  evil  for  strength's  sake,  of  rebellion  for 
the  soul's  sake,  is  not  for  the  domestic 
animal,  nor  yet  for  the  jackal;  nor  may 
cripples  become  gymnasts  nor  kitten-eyes 
dart  glances  at  the  sun.  At  last,  and  al 
ways,  the  mob  must  have  its  footpaths. 
Few  there  are  who  dare  walk  the  shifting 
surfaces  of  the  Milky  Way;  few  are  born 
to  voyage  against  the  North  Star. 

Wreak  your  soul  on  Life.  Use  your 
powers.  Never  question  whether  they  are 
moral.  Once  you  put  the  question  you  are 
already  weak. 

And  'ware  the  sly  Delilah,  Miss  Morality, 
and  her  lupanar,  the  State,  with  its  oils 
and  balsams  and  mighty  gelding-knife! 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

PHILOSOPHY      is      the      keyhole 
through  which  the  curious  may  peep 
into  the  smithy  of  the  Eternal,  where 
the  great  iron  laws  are  forged. 

The  quest  for  truth  is  the  human  fond 
ness  for  novelty — a  highly  specialized  in 
fantile  trait.  You  must  become  as  little 
children  to  set  forth  on  these  trackless 
mental  wastes.  Like  children,  you  will  be 
buffetted  hither  and  thither  by  a  million 
impulses.  All  things  must  be  tried  and 
tested — and  cast  away.  To  the  mind  of  a 
child  nothing  has  been  proved,  nothing  dis 
proved;  all  paths  lie  open.  There  is  no 
evil;  no  good  that  has  not  the  mark  of  hu 
man  expediency  on  it.  To  the  seer  and  the 
child  there  are  no  dogears  on  the  pages  of 
Life's  book;  no  one  has  been  there  before, 
and  it  matters  not  what  is  written  on  the 
page — read,  and  pass  on.  All  things  must 
be  approached  in  innocence  and  with  a 
naive  fearlessness.  It  is  literally  true  that 
(106) 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 107 

you  must  become  as  little  children  in  order 
to  see. 

I  wish  to  see  men,  like  Spinoza,  as  lines, 
planes,  bodies  and  circles,  and  so  study 
them.  Still,  while  I  wish  to  see  them  thus 
for  purposes  of  passionless  dissection,  it 
must  not  be  forgotten  that  men  are  not 
lines,  planes,  bodies  and  circles — that  they 
are  living  masses  of  matter  in  pain,  and 
that  there  is  more  logic  in  their  blasphemies 
than  in  their  prayers. 

The  relation  of  man  to  the  Great  Neces 
sity  which  is  called  God  is  not  an  ethical 
relation  but  is  a  geometrical  one.  There  is 
no  such  thing  as  Providence;  what  we  mis 
take  for  such  is  cosmic  economy. 

When  the  mind  first  perceives  the  illusory 
nature  of  the  heart's  greatest  desire  it  is  at 
that  moment  that  the  individual  has  taken 
his  first  step  along  the  upper  cosmic  tracts. 
Once  this  glimpse  is  caught,  there  is  no 
permanent  back-going — there  may  be  lapses 
to  lower  levels,  a  slipping  back;  but  forever 
and  ever  the  hyper-physical  eye  shall  re 
member  that  one  glimpse  it  caught  of  the 
Infinite. 

It  is  at  this  moment  that  the  larger  lust 
begins.  Earth  life  thenceforward  will  be  a 


108 A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

kind  of  long  sickness,  with  the  salt  savor 
of  that  endless  sea  forever  stinging  the 
nostrils  of  the  mind,  begging  it  hence  and 
away. 

He  who  believes  that  good  is  the  end  of 
the  universe,  tolerate  him;  he  who  believes 
that  evil  is  the  end  of  the  universe,  respect 
him — but  he  who  says  that  ends  are  myths, 
follow  him! 

Looking  from  a  very  high  building  down 
on  a  great  city  one  is  powerfully  impressed 
almost  at  the  first  look  with  the  evident 
absurdity  of  life.  One  receives  exactly  the 
same  impression  as  he  ascends  in  intelli 
gence,  The  eye  and  the  mind  are  here  in 
startling  agreement. 

Progress  defined  for  the  highest  mind  is 
a  motion  away  from  the  centres  of  motion, 
an  accretion  of  insight.  The  active  being 
flows  toward  his  objects;  the  contemplative 
being  has  objects  flow  to  him. 

All  the  waves  of  Time  can  be  held  at 
peace  in  the  lap  of  the  mind,  all  delusions 
can  be  held  in  the  pupil  of  the  eye,  and  the 
mouth  of  pain  can  be  twisted  into  a  smile. 
Against  the  infinite  screen  of  Self  the 
world-shadows  come  and  go,  and  the  fire 
flies  of  knowledge  emit  their  light  and  fall 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 109 

dead  forever,  and  Chance  undulates  in 
countless  waves,  or  swirls  and  spouts,  bear 
ing  peoples  and  nations  to  the  crest  and 
silently  dropping  them  into  the  hollows 
of  Oblivion.  Against  the  screen  of  Self 
is  all  this  pictured,  and  each  one  may  see 
it,  for  each  is  that  Self. 

If  the  objects  of  the  so-called  material 
universe  are  nothing  but  states  of  conscious 
ness,  then  there  is  no  one  particular  state 
of  consciousness  that  has  a  greater  validity 
than  any  other  state  of  consciousness.  If 
the  mind  is  merely  an  interpretative  organ — 
a  way  of  rendering  things,  a  manner  in 
which  the  individual  reduces  an  aspect  of 
the  Great  Mystery  to  some  degree  of  ra 
tionality — and  if  minds  differ  not  only  in 
degree  but  in  kind,  then  Reality  is  an  indi 
vidual  problem,  and  my  universe  is  not  your 
universe,  my  Reality  not  your  Reality. 

There  are  as  many  laws  as  there  are  sepa 
rate  existences.  Huxley  tells  us  about 
chalk,  Plotinus  about  the  Infinite,  Sweden- 
borg  about  angels.  Can  it  be  said  that 
Huxley's  interpretation  of  the  images  in 
his  mind  produced  by  an  utterably  unknown 
object  in  his  hand  is  an  interpretation  that 
comes  closer  to  some  central  Reality  than 


110 A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

the  interpretation  of  the  images  in  the  mind 
of  Swedenborg  produced  by  some  peculiar 
ity  of  his  organism?  If  the  angels  were  an 
hallucination,  why  not  the  chalk?  If  Ploti- 
nus  was  the  dupe  of  his  images  when  he  be 
lieved  that  twice  in  his  lifetime  he  had  united 
with  the  Infinite,  so  is  every  being  the  dupe 
of  his  images  when  he  unites  himself  with 
the  finite. 

We  are  no  more  "rational"  than  is  nec 
essary  for  our  continuance. 

Those  states  of  consciousness  which  come 
from  a  diseased  brain,  and  which  we  call 
insanity,  are  valid  for  the  insane.  Grotesque, 
fantastic,  irrational  they  may  be;  but  no 
less  grotesque,  fantastic,  irrational,  imbe 
cile  are  the  actions  of  all  who  dwell  in  the 
finite  to  the  eye  of  the  Yogi,  the  eman 
cipated  mind. 

Delusion  and  aimlessness  are  the  ear 
marks  of  insanity;  delusion  and  aimlessness 
are  the  earmarks  of  planetary  life.  One 
need  but  look  from  a  height. 

Pleasure  consists  in  the  passing  from  a 
lower  perfection  to  a  higher  perfection — 
that  is,  from  a  less  complete  realization  of 
Self  to  a  more  complete  realization  of  Self. 
Its  condition  is  the  instinct  to  eternal  rebel- 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 111 

lion,  an  undying  tendency  to  negative  all 
seeming  finalities. 

The  mind  lives  in  the  Eternal  in  the 
degree  that  it  puts  aside  intent,  aim,  object. 
They  who  shoot  at  targets  never  see  the 
heavens.  Inveterate  swimmers  are  at  last 
lost  in  the  element  they  sport  with.  All  in 
tention  is  proscription  and  smells  of  death. 

To  the  contemplative  mind  one  hour  is 
the  measure  of  the  life  and  death  of  a 
million  suns — one  day  the  hour-glass  of  all 
eternity. 

The  cosmic  mind  can  have  no  evil 
thoughts;  the  vilest  things  can  be  pictured 
there  and  smiled  at,  as  sunlight  may  lie 
over  a  brackish,  slimy  pool  and  will  none 
the  less  be  spotless  light,  or,  again,  as  vile 
pictures  can  be  shown  on  a  white  screen  and 
leave  the  whiteness  untarnished. 

To  understand  a  thing  thoroughly  for 
ever  puts  that  thing  beyond  the  pale  of 
hatred;  to  love  a  thing  merely  is  to  sub 
ject  oneself  to  the  possibility  of  hating 
that  thing.  Hence,  understanding  is  the 
highest  thing  in  the  world  because  it  in 
cludes  hate.  The  emancipated  reason  of 
man  is  the  Holy  Innocent. 

The  illusion  of  good  and  bad :  in  the  per- 


112 A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

formance  of  a  "good"  action  the  mind  is 
focused  on  the  effect  that  it  voluntarily  de 
sires  to  bring  about,  heedless  of  the  law  that 
each  act  begets  a  multitude  of  other  acts 
which  have  no  relation  in  morals  to  the  pri 
mal  intention. 

Pain  is  wrought  by  the  intrusion  of  a 
personal  desire,  opinion,  or  prejudice  in 
the  presence  of  an  inexorable  law. 

Misery,  in  the  last  analysis,  is  neither 
social,  political  nor  racial;  it  is  caused  by 
the  inability  of  the  individual  mind  to  dis 
criminate  between  what  is  its  good  and 
what  is  its  not-good.  Social  evils,  so-called, 
are  merely  the  lumping  together  of  the 
many  ignorances  of  many  minds.  Where 
all  are  blind  all  must  fall  into  the  ditch. 
He  who  can  discriminate  goes  free. 

The  higher  the  intelligence  the  finer  the 
powers  of  discrimination,  the  more  things 
you  will  reject;  the  more  things  you  reject 
the  freer  you  will  become.  All  social 
"remedies"  direct  us  how  to  get  more,  not 
how  to  be  more,  how  to  become  more.  The 
rich  dominate  the  poor;  as  a  remedy  the 
poor  purpose  to  dominate  the  rich.  Where 
in  lies  the  difference  ?  The  hawk  watches  the 
chicken  and  the  chicken  watches  the  worm. 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 113 

That  is,  in  brief,  the  game  of  society. 
Unless  you  abide  in  Self  you  are  evil. 

Evil  is  always  becoming  good;  good  is 
always  becoming  evil.  Change  is  readjust 
ment  ;  and  what  we  mean  by  eternal  change 
is  eternal  readjustment.  Hence  progress 
is  an  illusion.  For  progress  presupposes 
a  constant  net  gain  in  an  eternal  process. 
Which  is  the  same  thing  as  saying  that 
if  we  pour  a  peck  of  peas  into  another  peck 
measure  we  have  two  pecks  of  peas. 

The  intellect  cannot  sin;  what  is  called 
conscience  is  a  wordy  war  in  the  blood — a 
strictly  pathologic  symptom;  the  brain 
listens  to  the  dispute,  and  the  "still  small 
voice"  is  born.  But  the  brain  may  smile 
and  smile  and  forever  be  a  villain.  All 
things  are  permitted  it. 

All  future  events  are  decided — the  intel 
lect  merely  reveals  the  manner  of  the  in 
tention.  Each  tomorrow  is  already  past, 
and  related  to  eternity  you  have  already 
died;  related  to  Time,  you  still  live. 

The  thoughts  in  the  brain  are  nothing 
but  the  bodily  appetites  in  another  form. 

All  human  development  tends  to  the 
generation  and  perpetuation  of  error,  for 
the  more  complex  man's  activities  become 


114 A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

the  greater  the  number  of  illusions  it  re 
quires  to  stimulate  his  diverse  activities.  If 
man  in  his  growing  complexity  were  get 
ting  nearer  and  nearer  to  some  great  eter 
nal,  unifying  truth,  his  activities  would  de 
crease  as  he  neared  the  goal  and  human 
life  would  be  characterized  by  a  greater  and 
greater  simplicity. 

The  brain  is  the  flower  of  organic  life, 
and  our  thoughts  the  petals  on  the  flower. 
The  shedding  of  these  petals,  the  ceaseless 
dropping,  fading,  of  our  thoughts  reveal 
finally  the  worm  in  the  bud — the  nothing 
ness  of  man  and  the  futility  of  desire. 

Emotion  is  the  elemental  cosmic  fire;  in 
tellect  the  cleansing,  soothing  waters. 

Herbert  Spencer  tells  us  that  we  cannot 
get  beyond  states  of  mind;  thus  we  can 
never  know  the  Reality  of  which  mind  is 
a  mode  of  expression.  In  positing  this 
Reality  he  had  denied  the  possibility  of 
apprehending  it — a  contradiction.  There 
is  a  Consciousness  that  is  not  a  state  of 
mind;  it  is  something  immediately  given — 
and  in  rare  moments  we  know  we  are  that 
Consciousness.  Its  presence  is  not  appre 
hended  as  a  state  of  mind;  it  cannot  be 
thought  about — indeed,  it  vanishes  the  mo- 


A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 115 

ment  we  think  about  it — that  is,  the  moment 
we  have  a  "state  of  mind"  about  it. 

In  these  moments  we  know  that  all  our 
states  of  mind — personality  itself — are 
merely  a  lower  activity  of  that  Super-Con 
sciousness.  It  is  not  known  through  thought, 
but  thought  is  known  through  it.  It  is 
felt  as  a  Presence  when  there  is  the  least 
conscious  thought  in  the  mind.  It  is  known, 
apprehended,  with  a  degree  of  certainty  to 
which  a  transitory  state  of  mind  can  never 
attain.  It  comes  as  a  supreme  Awareness, 
abolishes  by  absorbing  Object  and  Sub 
ject,  Time  and  Space.  It  is  the  datum  of 
which  states  of  mind  are  mere  infinite  data. 

Flee  wheresoever  we  may  we  cannot  es 
cape  the  Centre.  The  universe  is  composed 
of  infinite  centres;  circumference  and  diam 
eters  are  illusions.  Endless  space  is  end 
less  centre.  All  evolution  is  a  movement 
from  centre  to  centre,  because  any  point 
bounded  on  all  sides  by  the  Infinite  must 
be  a  centre.  'The  centre  of  immensities,  the 
conflux  of  eternities" — there  is  nothing 
conceivable  that  is  not  always  there — and 
There  is  always  Here,  for  other  than  Here 
there  is  naught. 

The  highest  kind  of  action  is  meditation. 


116 A  MEMORABLE  ESCAPE 

Memory  may  cease,  identity  may  lapse, 
consciousness  may  blow  out,  but  Life  can 
not  end. 


THE  MASQUERADE 

THE  belief  in  an  external  universe  is 
the  superstition  of  the  senses.  Of  hear 
ing,  seeing,  feeling  and  tasting  have 
we  woven  these   filaments   of  matter   and 
garnished  the  immeasurable  hollows  of  the 
cosmos  with  stucco  and  pilaster  of  seeming. 
The  brain  itself  is  only  a  dream  of  conscious 
force  and  this  body  of  mine  but  a  haunted 
house,  itself  forever  withering  and  crumb 
ling  under  the  strain  of  its  mutabilities. 

The  Ego,  turning  everlastingly  on  its 
pivots  of  inexorable  activities,  whelps  its 
eerie  spectres  which  the  whimpering  thirst 
for  the  familiar  in  man  kneads  to  a  provi 
sional  hard-and-fast  universe. 

Change  is  avid  of  her  spawn,  and  the 
slime  of  circumstance  breeds  the  brilliant 
bubbles  which  we  are,  only  to  suck  us  back 
into  the  swart  of  the  grave,  which  is  the 
womb  of  newer  bubbles. 

I  move,  I  talk,  I  gesture  between  the 
thing  named  zenith  and  the  thing  named 
(117) 


118 THE  MASQUERADE 

nadir,  but  who  shall  tell  me  what  I  move 
toward  when  eternity  and  infinity  stretch 
before  and  behind  me?  I  speak,  but  who 
shall  put  a  value  on  my  speech  when  the 
ambushed  forerunning  Minute  shall  blend 
my  voice  into  the  spirit  of  a  million  gales 
and  split  my  words  into  their  infinite  sound- 
particles?  I  gesture,  but  what  do  I  hail 
when  the  phantom  I  hallooed  had  started 
out  of  the  same  hollow  heart  of  things  as 
my  gesture?  We  stand  upon  a  platform  of 
shadows  and  hail  the  echoes  of  Appearance. 
We  are  the  dials  that  mark  no  time;  we 
are  clocks  with  our  circumferences  every 
where  and  our  pivots  nowhere.  Out  on  the 
crag  of  our  supremest  imaging  there  is 
nothing  but — imagining! 

See  that  headless,  trunkless,  footless, 
brainless  spirit  of  man  with  its  one  tentacle 
of  desire  sprung  like  a  hair  from  off  the  im 
mobile,  unstirred  surface  of  the  pre-crea- 
tional  protoplasm — that  hair-like  tentacle 
feeling  its  way  from  the  cellars  of  the  Un- 
create  up  into  the  life-possibility,  coming 
out  of  its  swoon  of  a  trillion  cycles  in 
nullebiety,  bulging  into — aye,  fathering — 
this  phantasmal  universe  of  the  "hypocritic 
days." 


THE  MASQUERADE 119 

See  how  it  wove  that  fantastic  cycle  of 
law  which  we  call  evolution,  but  which  is 
only  the  ghostly  tape-measure  in  the  hands 
of  we  Wraiths  of  Desire.  Evolution  is 
only  the  method  by  which  matter  changes 
from  protoplasm  to  putridity  and  the 
method  by  which  mind  ascends  from  imita 
tion  to  extinction. 

There  lie  cancelled  in  the  sepulchres  of 
the  brain-cells  and  blood-cells  of  man  more 
ingenious  universes  than  all  accumulated 
Mind  can  imagine;  worlds  the  strange  en 
ginery  of  which  would  turn  mankind  into 
gibbering  idiots  if  they  ever  caught  a 
glimpse  of  them  through  some  freak  of  the 
subconscious,  ghost-fabricating  spirit  that  is 
the  soul  of  us.  The  ghosts  of  the  antique 
worlds  that  are  socketed  down  there  in 
Time's  soundless  voids !  When  they  walk  we 
shall  have  a  glimpse — if  we  retain  our 
reasons — of  the  absurdity  of  this  latest 
makeshift  of  the  imagination  in  which  we 
live. 

So  these  cosmic  trial-rooms  have  come 
and  gone,  and  we  arid  they  are  the  million 
anatomical  experiments  of  the  Thing. 

Moonless,  starless  universes  there  have 
been,  and  stones  with  brains,  and  men  and 


120 THE  MASQUERADE 

women  who  grew  from  trees,  and  lank, 
gigantic,  formless  beings  who  strode  from 
abyss  to  abyss,  and  furry  imps  with  twelve 
senses,  and  things  innominable  in  universes 
that  fructified  and  waned  and  shrunk  into 
huddled  corpses  and  are  no  more.  Or,  they 
live  as  faint  reminiscence  in  backworld 
dreaming  souls,  little  wrinkled  memories  in 
the  byplaces  of  the  subconscious,  the  half- 
erased  memorabilia  of  the  Almighty 
Mockery. 

This  colored  ooze  of  matter  which  flows 
along  Time's  lubricious  sluiceways — this 
colored  ooze  of  matter  which  is  our  universe, 
think  you  it  is  any  the  less  absurd  than 
those  foundered  in  incalculable  past  cycles? 
Cause  and  effect  give  you  proof  of  rational 
ity,  you  say;  but  what  is  the  cause  of  cause 
and  effect  and  the  effect  of  cause  and 
effect?  Where  is  your  ultimate?  Under  the 
cowl  of  Imagination  there  is  the  set  face 
of  Fear!  You  are  a  phantom  no  less  than 
the  spectres  that  stood  in  the  half -lit  rooms 
of  your  brain  last  night  when  you  "slept" — 
the  sleep  of  a  dreaming. 

That  brooding  vapor  which  we  name 
thought  sends  off  these  glaring  rings  of 
matter  which  noose  us  the  better  to  the  mud 


THE  MASQUERADE 121 

and  quicksands.  The  beds  of  rivers,  the 
bases  of  mountains,  the  roots  of  trees  are 
of  the  imaged  vapor  that  projects  its  shapes 
against  the  white  screen  of  consciousness. 
Upstarts  from  our  own  tombs,  we  etch  in 
the  ghastly  spaces  that  confront  us  suns 
and  moons  and  the  constellations  of  shining 
pebbles — and  rub  them  out  again. 

The  fangs  of  Change  fasten  on  all  sub 
stances  and  all  things  that  are  born  have 
as  sole  dower  a  windingsheet.  We  are  each 
and  all  of  us  separate  urns  filled  with  il 
lusory  flame  that  licks  up  shadows  and  that 
inter  at  last  only  silence. 

We  are  Time's  ail  and  Motion's  malady. 

To  grasp  and  hold  and  possess  a  thing 
is  the  marriage  of  mockeries,  the  coition  of 
shadows.  Man  is  the  wastrel  of  the  inutile, 
ageless  cycles.  Call  forth  from  the  earth 
all  that  have  gone  therein  and  the  earth 
would  turn  charnel-house,  the  very  trees 
pale  into  ashy  corpses  and  the  waters  swim 
with  depth  on  depth  of  phantom  faces  and 
the  Himalayas  gray  to  multiplied  skull- 
towers. 

Such  are  we  in  these  kilns  of  chance  and 
change  and  illusion. 

Little  lanterns  and  bell-buoys — nothing 


122 THE  MASQUERADE 

more  are  our  senses ;  lanterns  and  bell  buoys 
that  guide  the  phantom  Ego  for  a  little 
while  across  a  phantom,  mirage-studded 
waste.  Performance  is  the  gallows-tree  of 
Intention,  and  action  is  strangled  in  the 
hempen  folds  of  insight. 

Persons,  things,  historical  incidents  are 
the  poetics  of  Change,  the  scenic  properties 
in  a  play  that  is  neither  a  tragedy  nor  a 
comedy.  Rich  in  its  buffoonery,  it  ap 
proaches  the  farcical  or  the  pantomimic — a 
pantomime  played  in  a  darkened  auditorium 
with  a  mortal  coldness  blowing  out  of  the 
wings. 

The  spirit  that  rules  life  is  neither  a  spirit 
of  destruction  nor  a  spirit  of  creation;  it  is 
the  Spirit  of  Evanescence,  a  lapsing  of 
shadow  into  shadow,  a  fusing  and  inter 
changing,  with  a  perpetual  tendency  to  ex 
tinction,  for  each  thing  tends  to  return  to 
its  metaphysical  condition.  All  things  are 
momentary,  even  Eternity,  which  is  but  a 
flitting  thought  across  the  blank  surfaces 
of  the  Ego,  unseizable,  unstable;  all  that 
can  possibly  be  is  implicated  in  the  transi 
tory,  confederate  to  Oblivion. 

Pass  the  whole  universe  of  sense-contact 
through  the  spectrum  of  the  Ego's  interior 


THE  MASQUERADE 123 

vision  and  one  has  colors  and  vibrations 
only.  Here  Euclid  and  Grimm  are  of  equal 
importance  and  they  that  built  the  Pyramids 
built  things  as  vain  and  less  beautiful  than 
they  who  lie  under  the  Aurelian  wall. 


RESPECTABILITY 

NO  word  cows  like  Respectability. 
We  constantly  hear  those  phrases: 
"The  respectable  elements  of  the 
community,"  "the  respectable  citizens,"  "re 
spectable  people."  And  we  pass  dumbly, 
hat  in  hand  as  though  we  had  entered  a 
fane  dedicated  to  some  high  purpose,  when 
as  a  matter  of  fact  we  are  cringing  before 
a  paradise  of  cowards,  the  cardboard  gate 
of  which  is  painted  to  look  like  iron. 

On  the  waxed  and  shining  ramparts  of 
Respectability  struts  Conformity  dressed 
like  a  flunkey.  Behind  him  shambles  the 
lackey  Hypocrisy  muffled  in  gold-leaf. 
From  behind  the  walls,  from  deep  within 
this  Eden  of  parasites,  is  blown  a  sickening 
odor.  It  comes  from  the  live  beings  im 
prisoned  within  whose  souls  are  without 
drainage. 

The  dominant  instinct  in  "respectable 
circles"  is  fear.  The  psychology  of  respect 
ability  is,  thread  for  thread,  link  for  link, 
(124) 


RESPECTABILITY 125 

the  psychology  of  cowardice.  Long  genera 
tions  of  "respectable  families"  have  stu 
pidity  flickering  from  the  eyes  and  bilious 
abjectness  a-flutter  on  the  cheek. 

Respectability  is  a  survival  of  the  herd 
ing  instinct  of  the  lower  animals.  The 
plane  of  initiative,  which  is  distinctively 
human,  has  not  been  attained.  In  the  great 
droves  of  the  respectable — a  strange  mix 
ture  of  bovine  and  fox-like  instincts — dif 
ferentiation  has  not  yet  begun.  The  law 
of  variation  does  not  apply  here.  And  this 
is  because  in  these  vast  herds  there  are  no 
individuals;  there  is  only  type.  It  is  true 
that  they  are  called  by  different  names,  but 
this  no  more  signifies  individuality  than  the 
branding  of  numbers  on  oxen  signifies 
differences  of  intelligence. 

The  evolution  of  respectability  would  of 
course  have  to  include  the  evolution  of  mo 
tion  and  its  ramifications  from  the  first 
Colorless  Conformity,  wherein  Nothing 
was;  detailing  the  metaphysical  history  of 
the  first  rebellious  tremblings  in  that  massed 
vacuum — the  first  spurts  of  color,  the  first 
sinful  hankerings,  the  first  defiance  of 
immobility  of  the  original  sinful  atoms. 

Some  such  idea  as  this,  I  take  it,  runs 


126 RESPECTABILITY 

through  the  legend  of  Prometheus,  who 
rebelled  against  the  deadly-dull  philistinism 
of  the  gods  and  who  flung  the  glove — or, 
rather  the  fennel-rod  of  fire-anointed 
thought — in  the  face  of  Olympian  respect 
ability,  with  its  Sorosis,  ennuis  and  porch 
gossip,  and  who  was  punished  by  having 
his  vitals  nibbled  for  all  eternity  by  the 
croaking  ravens  of  the  Olympian  Status 
Quo. 

Again  we  find  it  in  another  form  in  the 
war  between  the  hosts  of  the  Lord  and 
Lucifer,  whose  quick  mind,  tinged  with  the 
healthy  Byronism  of  that  pre-Byronic  age, 
conceived  that  memorable  insurrection 
against  the  cataleptic  respectability  of 
Heaven. 

Still,  again,  the  legend  reappears  in 
Genesis,  where  the  serpent,  brain-full  of 
knowledge  and  wisdom,  stuck  his  fangs 
deep  into  the  Arcadian  respectability  of 
Eden,  shattering  not  only  the  complacency 
of  Adam  and  Eve  but  preparing  the  way 
for  Cain,  whose  heel,  stuck  deep  into  the 
sacrificial  offerings  of  his  smugly  dutiful 
brother,  flattened  the  nose  of  respectability 
and  gave  to  history  in  himself  its  first  Man. 

In  the  sphere  of  zoology  we  are  on  firmer 


RESPECTABILITY 127 

ground.  In  the  long  run,  mammals  of  the 
same  species  are  militantly  bourgeois.  They 
think  in  droves  and  instinctively  fend  them 
selves  against  the  incursions  of  the  New. 
There  are  no  doubt  renegade  whales  and 
baboons  with  ideas  of  individualized  des 
tinies  and  deers  that  overstep  the  calcined 
codes  of  mob-action  and  who  have  analyzed 
the  meaning  of  the  mincing  step,  the  boot 
leg  glance  and  the  homely  fireside  virtues 
of  their  companions ;  but  there  is  always  the 
restraint  of  a  depleted  larder  and  a  ruffled 
skin  and  Opinion  with  its  condemnations 
to  divers  hells.  Variation  from  the  type 
is  never  respectable.  A  reasonable  resilience 
is  often  granted,  but,  in  the  long  run,  it  is 
fatal  not  to  do  as  others  do.  Whinny  in 
herd-rhythm,  snarl  to  the  note  of  the  drove, 
let  your  lowing  be  according  to  your  sta 
tion — something  like  this  we  conceive  may 
be  the  rules  of  the  sub-human  protagonists 
of  the  "respectable  elements"  of  society. 
And  life  is  jigged  in  herd-time  and  the  soul 
of  the  sub-human  species  lies  in  its  lucent 
pickle. 

So  sub-human  respectability  streams  into 
the  human,  passing  over  by  narrow  ways 
and  mule -trails.  As  we  know  them  here 


128 RESPECTABILITY 

they  are  the  sons  of  God  and  Home  is 
God's  acre.  They  worship  at  the  godhead 
of  Authority,  "things  said,"  the  embalmed 
historic  lies.  They  stand  solidly  arrayed 
against  variation  from  the  mass,  as  do  their 
four-footed  betters.  They  all  have  the 
courage  of  rejecting  their  own  convictions. 
They  sit  rigid  in  their  moral  tarpaulins. 
They  make  daily  pilgrimages  to  their  own 
souls,  spotless  nullities.  The  Kabala  is  in 
Philadelphia.  The  Sacred  Stone  is  a  nugget. 
Pretence  is  the  first  virtue  among  them. 
If  they  post  to  forbidden  sheets,  it  is  done 
on  some  moral  hypothesis. 

This  giant  silent  conspiracy  of  mediocrity, 
this  race-thesaurus  of  the  average,  has  in 
all  ages  been  the  sworn  enemy  of  all  men 
tal  and  moral  progress.  Respectability  is 
the  leaden  weight  in  the  scale  of  conserv 
atism.  It  crucified  Christ  and  egged  Byron 
out  of  England.  It  excommunicated  Spi 
noza  and  hurried  with  the  fagots  that 
burned  Bruno.  It  invents  anti-vice  societies 
to  shelter  its  mind  against  its  own  porno 
graphic  instincts.  In  all  history  Respect 
ability  has  never  given  the  world  a  brave 
act,  a  brave  thought,  a  beautiful  idea.  Food 
and  sex — they  are  the  axes  on  which  it 


RESPECTABILITY 129 

turns;  for  it  life  is  only  significant  below 
the  navel. 

It  is  impossible  to  compute  the  number 
of  beings  that  have  been  chloroformed  in 
the  House  of  Respectability.  Bribed, 
beaten,  threatened,  the  spark  of  moral  or 
mental  revolt  has  gone  out  of  thousands 
of  young  minds  and  they  have  lived  in 
those  fetid  purlieus  and  died  with  a  chaplet 
of  the  ordained  virtues  on  their  brows, 
pews  paid  up  to  date,  the  coffin  neatly  be- 
flowered. 

At  birth  handed  iron  lances  to  fling  at 
the  sun,  they  came  to  cut  them  up  into 
darning  needles  and  book-cutters.  Found 
lings  of  ideas  pregnant  with  dreams,  they 
were  farmed  out  to  Rote,  their  dreams  pal 
ing  to  ashy  fears.  Their  hands  outstretched 
toward  the  open-seas  of  life,  they  have  felt 
in  their  muscles  the  palsy  of  will-lessness 
before  the  croaking  cries  of  the  landlubbers 
of  Respectability.  The  fine  purple  coat  of 
rebellion  becomes  a  seedy  house- jacket  and 
the  sandals  of  fire  are  exchanged  for  car 
pet-slippers  that  convey  one  noiselessly  over 
the  plush  conventions.  All  who  enter  there 
have  abandoned  themselves. 

The  temples   of   Respectability   are   the 


130 RESPECTABILITY  

abattoirs  of  the  quick  and  the  catacombs 
of  the  virile. 

Respectability  is  always  dragged  behind 
the  Spirit  of  Age.  It  is  the  inveterate 
enemy  of  the  innovative  spirit.  Philistia 
ends  where  ideas  begin.  What  seems  to 
be  growth  is  really  change  of  environment. 
Respectability  is  the  same  in  all  ages.  They 
are  the  same  people  who  drove  Mary  Mag 
dalen  into  the  gutter  as  those  who  held  up 
their  exquisitely  manicured  fingertips  in 
horror  at  Richard  Strauss'  "Salome."  Re 
spectability  refused  to  accept  the  Coperni- 
can  theory  of  the  universe  until  it  was 
hinted  that  not  to  do  so  would  stamp  it  as 
unconventional.  It  refused  to  accept  Ibsen 
as  a  great  seer  and  poet  until  it  found  out 
that  the  seventh-rate  literary  umpires  had 
swallowed  him. 

Nevertheless,  the  Viking  spirit  in  litera 
ture,  art  and  life  should  bless  Respectabil 
ity.  It  is  the  citadel  against  whose  walls 
strong  men  may  try  their  strength.  It  is 
a  brazen  hollow  image,  against  whose  pas 
sionless  face  warriors  may  practice  their 
skill  at  lance-throwing.  It  is  a  proving- 
ground  for  those  who  go  forth. 


THE  IMPENITENT 

TO  have  the  courage  of  one's  trans 
gressions — that  is  heroic.  To  repent 
of  one's  transgressions — that  is  mere 
ly  virtue.  All  apology  contains  an  element 
of  baseness.  To  whom  should  we  abase 
ourselves?  All  men  are  guilty  of  the  same 
meannesses — and  he  to  whom  I  bring  propi 
tiatory  gifts  will  give  them  to  some  one 
whom  he  has  offended.  It  is  the  penny  that 
ever  returns.  No  man  ever  asked  to  be 
forgiven  a  wrong  whose  knees  did  not 
quake.  This  joint-sag  is  the  atavistic  ten 
dency  to  beg  for  mercy  on  the  knees,  a  prim 
itive  obeisance  to  Strength,  the  "Peccavi!" 
of  the  lost. 

The  arch-impenitent  awes  us  by  his  as 
sumption  of  power;  in  his  fine  disdains  we 
catch  gleams  of  the  elemental,  the  barbaric. 
His  is  the  confidence  of  the  predestined; 
the  aloofness  and  soul-sufficiency  that  rely 
on  Fate,  whose  will  will  be  done.  He  is  of 
the  open  spaces.  Conscience,  with  its  sick- 
(131) 


132 THE  IMPENITENT 

room  airs,  has  not  yet  alchemized  the  Pro 
methean  fires  in  his  soul  to  the  poisonous 
drool  wherewith  the  terror -hounded  forever 
water  the  rank  flowers  of  the  past.  He  who 
is  without  conscience  is  without  weakness — 
for  conscience  is  the  past  trying  to  live 
twice,  the  frost  that  chills  the  seeds  of  god- 
hood  in  us,  the  back-water  that  we  hold  to 
scour  our  souls  when  life  is  at  low-tide. 
A  poet  of  transcendent  overdreams  has  re 
corded  the  fact  that  "Conscience  does  make 
cowards  of  us  all" — and  he  gave  us  Hamlet 
from  his  hot,  subtle  brain  to  prove  it. 

To  trace  the  evolution  of  conscience — of 
that  pathologic  still,  small  voice  which  man 
kind  declares  tells  it  when  it  is  doing  wrong 
— would  be  to  write  the  history  of  mankind's 
defeated  dreams.  Anything  that  man  can 
accomplish  is  right.  By  a  trick  of  thought, 
goaded  by  some  stern,  masked  necessity,  he 
makes  it  so.  What  he  has  failed  in  he  decrees 
"wrong."  The  race  is  eternally  adjusting 
itself  to  its  own  weaknesses,  which  it  styles 
its  virtues.  The  individual  soul  is  a  hell  of 
lost  lusts  whose  ghosts  forever  trouble  us 
with  their  claims.  We  seldom  stop  to  ask 
whether  they  have  real  rights,  whether  the 
fetor  of  their  breath  on  our  pale,  anemic 


THE  IMPENITENT 133 

souls  is  not  the  poison  that  our  later  selves 
have  breathed  into  these  wondrous,  ancient 
beasts,  whom  we  have  denied  in  our  fear, 
but  who  lie  deep-buried  in  the  sands  of  our 
souls,  mumbling  and  drowsing  and  calcu 
lating  like  the  Sphinx. 

There  is  a  living  soul  behind  that  hand 
which  in  the  shadow  of  the  gibbet  firmly 
waves  aside  the  rose-water  consolations  of 
the  priest.  The  gesture  has  the  sombre 
majesty  of  the  Inexorable.  Murderer  he 
may  be  ten  times  over — a  murderer,  like  an 
adultress,  is  a  legal  fiction — still  he  will  not 
sully  his  soul  with  that  last,  greatest  in 
firmity — the  cry  of  the  human  to  the  Eter 
nal  to  reverse  the  iron  order  and  sponge 
from  time  what  time  was  bade  do.  We 
may  hurl  at  the  malefactor  who  is  sullen 
defiance  to  the  last  our  fatuous  anathemas 
with  the  wonderful  syntax,  but  in  secret 
we  revere  his  grim  amiability  in  the  face  of 
the  Irrevocable.  An  inflexible  necessity 
hounds  him  to  the  end.  He  who  builded 
the  house,  let  Him  look  to  it.  The  tenant 
must  take  what  he  finds.  And  if  we  for 
give  him — that  is  the  crowning  puerility  of 
mediocrity.  For  at  bottom  "I  forgive  thee" 
means  "I  no  longer  fear  thee."  We  never 


134      THE  IMPENITENT 

forgive  those  who  have  it  still  in  their  power 
to  harm  us.  And  the  patronizing  forgive 
ness  of  Eternal  Omnipotence,  the  pat  on 
the  head,  to  have  the  dust  smilingly  flecked 
from  your  coat  by  the  finger  of  Omni 
science — what  great  soul  will  submit  to  that? 

Hope  is  a  masked  blasphemy — and  re 
pentance  is  the  mask  turned  inside  out.  The 
self  swells  to  huge  proportions  beneath  the 
introspective  eye.  The  ego,  reeling  drunk 
on  its  own  private  lusts — intoxicated  by 
its  very  thirst — makes  of  its  desires  an  end 
less  tape-measure,  which  it  unreels  from  the 
cradle  to  the  pit;  and  even  upon  the  brink 
of  the  clay-walled  hole,  with  lean  and  flesh- 
poor  fingers,  it  tries  to  measure  some 
phantom,  brain-born  Beyond.  We  will 
have  no  destiny  but  our  own,  no  wide- 
circling  fate-full  laws  that  have  not  pro 
vided  for  us,  no  wind  that  does  not  blow 
our  bark  to  some  haven  mapped  out  in  the 
chaotic  foreworld  for  the  special  delectation 
and  eternal  safe-housing  of  that  gilded 
granule — the  fadeless  and  indestructible 
Me! 

There  is  not  enough  natural  faith  in  the 
world.  There  is  nothing  we  have  doubted 
more  than  the  fundamental  verities.  All 


THE  IMPENITENT 135 

believe  that  two  and  two  make  four  until 
it  comes  time  to  die;  then  we  ask  God  to 
make  two  and  two  five — or,  please  God, 
four-and-a-half;  and  we  twist  and  turn  and 
try  to  blarney  Him  down  to  four-and-a- 
quarter — "just  this  once,  God."  This  spe 
cies  of  God-baiting  is  called  repentance. 
Few  have  the  courage  to  believe  their  evil 
deeds  were  predestined,  were  the  outcome 
of  an  endless  past,  the  sewage  of  great 
world-currents.  "I  am  I,"  cried  Magda, 
the  impenitent  and  regal — and  that  fine 
challenge  was  answered  by  "Come  up 
Higher,  thou!" 

Each  trivial  act  is  dissolved  in  a  govern 
ing  law,  and  all  law  is  noosed  in  a  remote 
necessity.  Each  impulse  is  compounded 
of  many  impulses,  and  our  faintest  thought 
trails  back  to  the  sun.  The  very  disbelief 
in  a  necessity  for  all  our  acts  and  thoughts 
is  a  matter  of  necessity.  There  is  a  tem 
perament  that  would  deny  the  fatality  of 
temperament.  The  author  of  Job  gave  us 
a  peep  into  the  star-chamber  where  our  in 
dividual  destinies  are  decided.  And  Goethe, 
who  himself  smiled  from  his  citadel  set  on 
the  other  side  of  good  and  evil,  made  Faust 
the  victim  of  a  conspiracy. 


136 THE  IMPENITENT 

The  philosopher  of  impenitence  was  the 
great  Spinoza — Spinoza  the  remorseless  and 
the  daring.  He  was  the  master  immoralist 
— or  non-moralist — and  from  his  spiritual 
loins  sprang  the  great  psychologist,  the 
ferret-brained  Nietzsche.  God  created  time 
and  Spinoza  destroyed  it.  For  him  the 
past  did  not  exist — his  serene  soul  moved 
from  Now  to  Now.  Booted  and  sandaled, 
a  Knight  of  the  Open  Road,  he  went  forth 
in  youth  to  do  battle  with  the  most  profit 
able  lie  ever  concocted — the  lie  of  free-will — 
a  priestly  invention  to  absolve  the  Most 
High. 

Spinoza's  God  we  can  pass  over.  It  was 
nothing  but  a  formula  for  ennui — an  omni 
potent,  omnipresent,  indestructible  stupid 
ity.  It  had  no  knowledge  of  good  or  evil, 
but  abided  in  a  transcendental  state  of 
total  ignorance.  It  was  a  sort  of  spiritual 
glue  that  held  all  things  together. 

The  days  of  this  lens-grinder  were  white- 
capped  negations.  From  the  other  side  of 
life  he  watched  humans  playing  and  dis 
sected  their  emotions.  He  conceived  the 
emotions  to  be  a  sort  of  poisonous  coil,  a 
tangle  that  held  man  in  the  mud.  For  the 
tear-besotted  sentimentality  that  is  forever 


THE  IMPENITENT 137 

looking  back  upon  an  arid  past  he  had  that 
profound  contempt  which  philosophers 
have  masked  under  a  brain-smile. 

Good  and  evil  are  relative  terms  and 
mean  nothing  to  him  whose  vision  extends 
beyond  the  immediate  effect  of  each  act. 
There  is  no  code  that  lasts  a  thousand  years. 
There  is  necessity,  which  is  to  say  no  man 
can  escape  himself.  His  most  unlawful 
acts  are  lawful,  and  in  nature  there  are  no 
such  things  as  transgressions.  Or,  rather, 
there  is  nothing  else — all  is  transgression. 
Government  is  an  organized  transgression. 
Its  excuse  for  being  is  that  it  can  carry  on 
the  cosmic  system  of  vengeance  better  than 
the  individual  can. 

Spinoza  was  the  most  cold-blooded  anarch 
who  ever  lived  and  certainly  the  boldest 
moral  —  or  immoral  —  philosopher.  He 
crawled  out  to  the  eaves  of  things,  peeped 
over,  and  boldly  took  the  leap.  He  burned 
all  bridges,  cut  all  bonds,  wiped  all  yester 
days  from  his  mental  slate,  asked  for  no 
philosophic  quarter  and  gave  none. 

What  is  evil?  he  asked.  Evil  is  that  which 
gives  man  pain.  Not  only  pain  that  comes 
from  external  things,  but  pain  that  comes 
from  ourselves  is  evil.  Conscience  is  evil 


138 THE  IMPENITENT 

because  it  is  the  soul  preying  on  itself.  It 
is  a  Torquemada  invented  by  sickly  souls 
who  still  dwell  in  the  mists  of  the  emotional 
foreworld. 

Come  with  me  into  the  beyond-world  of 
the  intellect,  of  the  understanding,  and  see 
yourself  and  your  comic  sins  as  my  placid, 
immovable,  passion-dry  God  sees  you!  cried 
Spinoza. 

"Repentance  is  not  a  virtue,  nor  does  it 
arise  from  reason;  but  he  who  repents  of 
an  action  is  doubly  wretched  and  infirm," 
he  says  calmly  in  a  celebrated  proposition. 
The  original  transgression  has  inflicted  pain 
on  someone;  but  the  act  was  motived  not 
in  you  but  in  the  endless  past  that  stretched 
away  before  your  birth  and  was  latent  in 
the  sidereal  gases.  What  can  your  repent 
ance  do  but  add  pain  to  pain,  tear  to  tear, 
anguish  to  anguish?  All  the  waters  of 
Araby  will  not  wash  your  damned  spots  out, 
because  the  waters  of  Araby  cannot  inun 
date  the  infinite;  and  your  weaknesses, 
which  you  call  your  sins,  were  predestined 
in  unremembered  past  durations. 

The  doctrine  of  human  responsibility  is 
one  that  has  its  uses.  Historically,  society 
is  an  evolving  illusion,  and  it  feeds  on  lies 


THE  IMPENITENT 139 

like  the  daughter  of  Rappacini  lived  and 
thrived  on  poisons.  But  there  is  a  finer 
virtue  than  self-condemnation — it  is  self- 
absolution.  Penitence  is  an  hysterical 
tickle-self.  It  is  like  one  of  those  scorching, 
belly-burning  dishes  that  degenerate  Rome 
concocted  to  stimulate  a  jaded  palate  and 
a  blase  maw.  "Confession  is  good  for  the 
soul,"  it  is  said — that  is,  it  is  pleasurable, 
and  we  invent  sins  for  the  pleasure  of  con 
fession  and  repentance.  Like  dead  flies  in 
a  bowl  of  curdled  cream,  so  lies  the  soul 
of  man  in  his  tear-vats.  The  lives  of  men 
are  an  endless  expiation,  as  Emerson,  a 
crowned  god  of  the  Overworld,  has  said. 
The  souls  of  the  repentant  are  great  penal 
colonies — their  days  a  series  of  vicarious 
atonements. 

Each  day  we  should  be  apostate  to  a  self 
is  the  essence  of  the  teaching  of  Spinoza. 
The  progressive  evolution  of  the  individual 
soul  is  like  the  uncoiling  of  an  infinite  chain, 
each  link  of  which  differs  from  the  other. 
Some  links  are  dun-colored,  some  are  slime- 
corroded,  some  are  of  gleaming  gold,  some 
of  neutral  tints,  and  some  fleece-white.  The 
slime-smeared  link  cannot  dominate  the  free 
soul.  It  was  forged  in  hell;  let  hell  look  to 
its  works! 


140  THE  IMPENITENT 

There  are  two  orders  of  beings;  they 
whom  their  devils  use  and  they  who 
use  their  devils.  Spinoza  was  Orestes 
triumphant. 

Goethe  was  a  spiritual  Titan  who  strode 
through  his  own  soul  and  reached  an  outer 
most  gate  where  he  signaled  back  a  "Come 
hither  and  see!"  to  the  sickly  age  in  which 
he  lived.  Goethe  saw  life  from  so  high  a 
point  that  his  rejection  of  life  and  his  ac 
ceptance  of  life  were  the  same  thing.  He 
stood  where  all  things  merged  and  com 
prehended  in  a  glance  the  meaninglessness 
of  any  one  thing  and  yet  the  necessity  which 
urged  all  things  to  disappear  in  one  another. 
"Sin,"  "evil,"  "pain"  were  to  him  fine  ex 
periences  which  no  great  soul  should  shrink 
from;  rather  should  pain  be  courted  for 
the  residuum  of  wisdom  that  lies  at  the 
bottom  of  it.  Does  the  physician  who  has 
inoculated  himself  with  deadly  germs  for 
the  purpose  of  furthering  an  intellectual 
lust  regret  his  action  if  the  experiment  has 
yielded  him  a  truth,  even  though  looking 
on  that  truth  has  condemned  him  to  death  ? 
So  in  the  spiritual  sphere  Goethe  would 
urge  us  to  live  our  sins  half-gayly  for  the 
knowledge  they  bring,  and  never  to  look 


THE  IMPENITENT 141 

back    lest    we    turn    to    pillars    of    jelly. 

Let  him  who  is  perfect  and  stupid  repent, 
for  he  has  not  yet  lived;  but  he  who  has 
been  bludgeoned  and  has  bludgeoned  in 
turn;  who  has  been  taken  and  given  in  the 
combats  where  each  instinct  fights  for  its 
own;  who  has  made  of  his  own  life  a 
shambles  and  yet  peered  at  himself  from 
time  to  time  from  the  little  white  turret 
in  the  brain-apex — let  him  rejoice  and 
repent  not.  The  fox  is  caught  in  the  gin 
and  the  star  is  enmeshed  in  law  and  the 
souls  of  men  are  matrixed  in  their  destinies. 
The  lithe-limbed  Goethe  swam  through  the 
flotsam  and  jetsam  of  his  acts  and  brushed 
the  slime-matted  seaweed  from  his  eyes — 
swam  to  a  point  where  the  waters  meet  the 
stars  and  escaped  with  Spinoza  into  the  un- 
arithmetical  spaces. 

How  fast  our  sickly  pasts  would  decom 
pose  and  vanish  in  their  poisonous  mists  did 
we  not  forever  keep  them  alive  with  our  in 
verted  glances!  We  lie  on  the  crest  of  an 
on-moving  wave,  but  instead  of  taking  our 
bearings  from  an  everlasting  height — the 
immovable  present  moment — we  glance 
down  with  tear-stained  cheeks  into  the 
hollow  we  believe  we  just  rose  from,  or 


142  THE  IMPENITENT 

stand  wringing  our  hands  in  fear  of  the 
hollow  we  believe  we  are  about  to  disappear 
in. 

What  is  the  outcome  of  our  acts?  Our 
most  damnable  lies  may  breed  in  time's 
mighty  tangle  unforgettable  virtues.  And 
if  one  could  trace  back  those  actions  which 
make  him  complacent  he  would  find  them 
rooted  in  degradation  that  would  bring  the 
inerasable  pallors  to  his  soul. 

The  religion  of  Buddha  is  founded  on 
the  profoundest  cosmic  vision  that  ever  il 
lumined  a  human  mind.  The  world  is  an 
expedient,  and  nothing  is  or  is  not  but 
thinking  makes  it  so.  In  the  view  of  the 
Buddhist,  repentance  is  as  idle  as  rejoicing, 
for  both  spring  from  the  illusion  of  self — 
that  transitory  agglomeration  of  millions 
of  individuals  which  science  calls  cells.  All 
are  in  the  whirl  of  law;  the  individual  is 
bound  to  a  fiery,  whirling  wheel  that  one 
moment  ducks  him  in  mud  and  the  next 
moment  whirls  him  to  azure  vistas.  You 
are  the  mud,  the  azure,  the  wheel,  and  the 
fiery  whirl;  you  are  all  but  yourself.  So 
the  Buddhist,  negativing  past,  present,  top, 
bottom,  good,  evil,  here,  hereafter,  folds  his 
toga  about  him  and  lies  down  to  pleasant 
Nirvanas. 


THE  IMPENITENT 143 

Self -consciousness  may  destroy  or  create. 
The  first  peep  into  ourselves  terrifies  us, 
and  if  we  do  not  succumb  to  what  we  see 
in  that  glance  into  the  inferno  out  of  which 
we  have  wriggled  we  shall  live  to  spurn  it, 
or  better,  utilize  it.  Your  soul  will  in  time 
become  a  fine  drama — a  playhouse  with 
one  silent  auditor.  You  will  love  your 
"sins"  for  the  sake  of  the  climaxes  that 
their  triumph  or  defeat  leads  up  to.  You 
will  become  your  own  hero,  your  own 
ideal  of  perfect  villainy;  and  when  you 
grow  tired  of  the  performance  you  can 
enter,  through  the  medium  of  art,  into  the 
marvellous  adventures  of  other  men's  souls, 
for  all  lofty  minds  at  last  dramatize  or  sing 
themselves  in  some  form.  Emerson's  essays 
are  the  chronicle  of  his  spiritual  escapades, 
Ibsen's  plays  are  his  jungle-story,  Chopin 
set  himself  to  music,  and  Balzac  explored 
himself  and  made  of  truth  a  gorgeous  fic 
tion. 

St.  Augustine,  who  was  so  black  that  he 
turned  white,  and  who,  like  Tolstoi,  mistook 
impotency  for  self-mastery,  says  that  we 
may  rise  on  our  dead  selves  to  higher  things. 
Rather  may  we  rise  on  our  live  selves  to 
higher  things.  The  past  is  dead  only  in 


144 THE  IMPENITENT 

the  sense  that  it  never  existed.  Walt 
Whitman  sang  of  himself  in  his  entirety — 
"denying  nothing."  He  was  always  just 
ahead  of  himself.  Nature,  he  saw,  had  no 
penitential  days;  she  was  ruthless  and 
blithe,  possessed  something  of  a  naive  cun 
ning,  used  compost  and  lily-pollen  in  her 
laboratories,  made  poems  of  her  rain-days 
and  fair  days — and  nothing  was  ever  amiss. 
Both  Emerson  and  Whitman  recognized 
evil,  but  refused  to  admit  the  idea  of  sin 
into  their  conception  of  things.  They  lived, 
like  Spinoza  and  Goethe,  in  the  overspaces 
and  were  never  troubled  by  that  form  of 
spiritual  dyspepsia  which  comes  from  over 
eating  at  the  tables  of  the  past. 

Friedrich  Nietzsche  saw  in  conscience 
the  greatest  evil  that  the  brooding  mind  of 
man  had  ever  raised  up.  The  great  rhap 
sodical  psychologist,  who  flung  down  in 
passionate  hate  the  gage  of  battle  to  the 
other-world  roisterers,  saw  to  the  bottom 
of  that  pit  of  slime,  the  soul  of  man.  Those 
who  had  lusted  and  failed  of  their  lusts 
had  spawned  conscience,  which  begat  guilt, 
which  begat  sin,  which  begat  emaciation, 
penitence  and  heaven-hunger,  which  begat 
another  world,  where  the  strong  men  cease 


THE  IMPENITENT 145 

from  taking  and  the  eunuchs  get  the  best. 
The  weak,  the  tear-stained,  the  neurotic, 
the  diseased  build  and  build,  and  into  their 
earth-palaces  they  enter  not,  so  they  have 
conspired  to  overthrow  the  palaces  that 
have  been  erected  by  their  masters,  the 
strong,  the  unrelenting,  the  never-regret 
ting,  the  impenitents.  And  they  have  made 
of  their  weaknesses  virtues  and  put  craft 
and  cunning  into  the  seat  of  power  and 
made  idols  of  pillars  of  salt.  The  vengeful 
eyes  of  the  lost  flash  from  behind  their 
masks  of  love,  and  the  knotted  veins  of 
cruelty  are  concealed  by  a  crown  of  thorns. 
There  is  no  motive  power  in  regrets — 
that  way  lies  death — or,  worse,  the  jealous 
rage  that  begets  him  who  loves  his  fellow- 
man  too  much  and  himself  not  at  all.  Self- 
love  is  the  condition  of  all  love:  the  bud 
must  flower  before  it  can  seed;  the  sun 
is  the  sun  to  its  last  outpost  of  flame.  The 
impenitent  is  himself  to  his  last  act;  he 
presages  a  new  series,  where  evolution  and 
devolution  are  one;  where  there  is  neither 
growth  nor  decay,  but  an  eternal  transition, 
a  rising  from  equilibrium  to  equilibrium, 
from  infinite  sweep  to  infinite  sweep. 


THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE 

THE  mystery  t)f  surfaces,  the  delight 
of  touch,  the  joy  bred  of  the  mel 
odies  of  motion,  the  ecstasy  of  con 
tact  with  ideas  that  germinate  newer  per 
spectives  and  that  pullulate  with  reminis 
cences  that  wear  over  their  faces  the  purple 
veils  of  fantasy,  mutilated  memorabilia  of 
ante-natal  experiences — and  all  these  things 
unallied  to  any  idea  of  responsibility,  mun 
dane  or  super-mundane;  just  life  for  life's 
sake;  the  adventure  of  the  mind  in  matter; 
the  adventure  of  the  senses  in  air  and  water 
and  sunlight  and  rain;  to  sack  the  minutes 
of  their  possibilities;  to  privateer  against 
the  day  of  death;  to  skirt  the  coasts  of 
strange  lands  built  of  those  moods  that  arise 
in  the  brain  just  before  waking  time; 
plagiarizing  no  rules  and  making  none; 
foraging  on  all  men's  thoughts;  smuggling 
through  the  cellars  of  the  sub-conscious  the 
gold  and  silver  of  daily  experience,  to  be 
wrought  to  unfamiliar  shapes  in  those  dark- 
(146) 


THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE         147 

ened  smithies;  to  gut  life,  to  maraud  on  the 
farthest  borders  of  the  conceivable,  and  to 
stand  accoutred  at  the  tomb  with  the  loot 
of  all  this  world  prepared  for  another  ap 
prenticeship  in  consciousness:  Such  is  the 
passionate  purpose  of  the  pagan. 

The  miraculous  does  not  happen;  the 
miraculous  is.  The  pagan  attitude  is  the 
attitude  of  wonder,  amazement,  childish 
delight.  Matter  is  haunted.  Winter  is 
haunted  with  the  ghost  of  a  spring.  With 
ered  branches  with  the  ice  glittering  upon 
them  hold  latent  within  them  the  perfumed 
rose.  The  atom  is  a  tiny  house  with  many 
ghosts.  Sunlight  on  my  shoe  is  inexpli 
cable.  Aye,  this  sunlight  is  haunted — else 
how  came  this  world?  All  science  is  classi 
fied  folklore.  Government  by  pixies  is  not 
one  jot  inferior  to  government  by  earth 
quake,  fire,  famine  and  evolving  sidereal 
extinction. 

So  the  pagan  stands  swathed  in  the  sense 
of  elemental  mystery,  translating  all  things 
back  to  their  private,  original  glamour,  and 
with  the  witchcraft  of  his  holy  innocence — 
which  contains  much  of  the  riant  diablerie 
of  adolescence — unwinding  the  cords  of 
complexity  that  man  has  wound  round  and 


148         THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE 

round  the  omnipotent  Ghost  that  permeates 
all  things. 

By  the  mechanism  of  association  of  ideas 
we  generally  ally  the  word  paganism  with 
the  words  Ancient  Greece.  But  that  ad 
mirable  flowering  of  the  human  spirit,  those 
few  centuries  wherein  Mind  and  Matter 
played  the  unrepentant  prodigal  with  their 
own  native  inheritances,  was  no  isolated 
phenomenon.  Paganism  is  the  instinct  for 
liberty.  It  is  a  tendency,  not  a  bundle  of 
opinions. 

A  pagan  movement  is  always  a  "new 
movement."  It  is  always  a  rebellion  against 
dogma,  codes,  conventions,  systems;  it  is 
the  deep  procreant  spirit  that  wages  war 
against  all  forms  of  stupidity.  It  is  the  im 
mortal  red  bud  that  miraculously,  age  after 
age,  in  literature,  art  and  thought,  bursts 
through  the  leaden  strata  of  custom;  the 
sword  whetted  with  light  that  cuts  the 
thongs  of  familiarity  that  are  twisted  round 
and  round  the  living,  palpitant  soul  of  man. 

There  is  always  a  renaissance  somewhere 
in  the  world.  The  human  spirit  will  not 
long  be  set  in  limits.  It  will  suffer,  but 
it  will  not  rest.  The  pagan  spirit  comes 
to  stir  the  dead,  to  blast  the  sight  with  its 


THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE        149 

supernal  vistas  or  to  twist  us  to  frenetic 
maenads  with  its  sudden  inundation  of 
Beauty.  It  may  be  the  sudden  epiphany 
of  a  Nietzsche  in  philosophy,  a  murderous 
force  that  burns  up  everything  in  its  trail, 
including  itself,  after  having  set  in  flames 
the  rotting  ramparts  of  the  orthodox  gods. 

Or  it  may  be  the  quiet  intrusion  in  life 
of  a  Walter  Pater,  who  wove  with  the 
golden  thread  of  antique  dreams  that  great 
arras  curtain  that  holds  in  the  irrevocable 
quiescence  of  its  web  the  stories  of  the 
spiritual  wayfaring  of  Marius,  Denis 
L'Auxerrois,  Sebastian  Van  Storck  and 
Florian  Deleal; — Pater  who  was  the  renais 
sance  of  the  Renaissance. 

Or  it  may  be  the  unannounced  recurrence 
of  a  Pierre  Louys,  whose  "Songs  of  Bilitis" 
conjugate  the  things  seen  with  the  eye  and 
the  things  touched  of  the  body  in  all  their 
moods,  tenses  and  inflections.  With  the 
language  of  babes  he  transfigures  and  re 
juvenates  a  staled  world.  The  wonder  of 
trees,  of  lakes,  of  human  nudity,  of  the 
simplest  emotions  assaults  us  like  a  reproach 
after  turning  these  pages.  The  bellied, 
sun-flecked  sail  of  the  ship  that  lurches 
high-low  in  Mitylene  waters,  the  singing  of 


150         THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE 

rain-drops  on  the  surfaces  of  pools  set  in  a 
sombre  woods,  the  music  of  lovers'  steps 
as  they  walk  to  the  tryst — simple,  immortal 
things,  with  not  a  trace  of  moral  millinery 
about  them  nor  the  rouged  smirk  of  guilt. 

William  Sharpe  was  of  those  who  pro 
claimed  the  Golden  Year.  In  "Vistas"  there 
is  a  Pere  Hilarion  who  forsakes  his  cowl 
and  girdle  at  the  call  of  love,  and,  ripping 
the  Crucified  from  the  Cross  that  stands 
on  the  shore  of  the  waters  that  divide  Yea- 
land  from  Nay-land,  he  flings  it  angrily 
into  the  current  and  plunges  to  the  other 
shore — Yea-land — with  the  woman  he  loves. 
They  vanish  in  the  dawn.  The  same  motive 
recurs  in  "Cathal  of  the  Woods."  A  young 
priest  is  buried  alive  in  a  tree  for  breaking 
his  vows.  He  loved  a  King's  daughter. 
But  from  the  tree  the  soul  of  Cathal 
prophesies  the  doom  of  the  preachers  of  the 
new  faith,  the  disciples  of  the  White  God 
of  Galilee.  Of  the  priest  who  decreed  his 
tree-death  Cathal  sings: — 

"Flame  burn  him  in  heart  of  flame,  and 
may  he  wane  as  wax  at  the  furnace, 

And  his  soul  drown  in  tears,  and  his  body 
be  a  nothingness  upon  the  sands." 

Cathal  becomes  a  tree-man  and  finds  his 


THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE         151 

sweetheart,  a  tree-woman,  and  they  become 
as  immortal  as  Nature,  spurning  the 
ephemeral  Gods  of  nations  and  their  sapless 
priests. 

And  through  the  familiar  labyrinths  of 
life  it  is  thus  that  some  human  revenant  of 
the  usurped  gods  always  comes  to  pour  his 
libations  of  joy,  to  jettison  his  fulness,  to 
spill  into  the  golden  matrices  of  art  this 
Hyperborean  postlude. 

If  the  erotic  Sappho  was  a  pagan,  so 
was  the  austere  Epicurus.  In  our  day  Renan 
and  Anatole  France,  Goethe  and  Keats, 
Swinburne  and  D'Annunzio  were  pagans. 
Rabelais  and  Montaigne  left  records  that 
smug  gentility  has  not  yet  found  the  means 
of  annulling.  The  spirit  of  scepticism  is 
essentially  pagan.  Dogma  and  morals  orb 
in  the  same  beaten  track.  Both  are  pa 
rochial.  There  is  a  chance  that  man,  evolv 
ing  toward  superterrestrial  spheres,  may 
stumble  across  the  skirts  of  Truth  some 
day;  but  he  can  never  do  it  in  the  company 
of  Dogma  or  Morals. 

Paganism,  on  its  intellectual  side,  is  the 
spirit  of  receptivity.  It  feels  all  things  and 
knows  nothing,  smiles  and  fingers  with  a 
pitying  touch  the  shuttle  of  Destiny 


152         THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE 

which     weaves     such     calamitous     issues. 

For  what  one  thinks  signifies  little;  but 
the  manner  in  which  one  thinks  reveals 
one's  affinities.  Individuality  does  not  lie 
in  our  thought,  but  the  way  we  characterize 
thought.  There  are  no  new  messages  for 
the  world;  there  are  only  new  messengers 
from  old  principalities;  new  eyes  that  re 
read  the  old  parchments.  The  manner  in 
which  one  feels  a  thought,  that  consecrates 
him. 

Paganism  is  attitude. 

The  psychical  root  of  paganism  is  feel 
ing.  Its  test-tubes  are  pleasure  and  pain. 
Its  metaphysic  is  the  eternality  of  the  pres 
ent  moment.  Life  is  its  own  excuse  and 
pleasurable  feelings — mental  and  physical — 
are  the  anthemings  of  the  glad  gods  on  the 
keyboard  of  nerves.  Religion  is  fatigue. 
To  be  "saved"  for  another  world  is  to  be 
"lost"  to  this — the  adventurer  grown  tired, 
Siegfried  hesitating  before  the  rampart  of 
flame,  Prometheus  recanting,  Man  the  Vik 
ing  on  the  seas  of  sound,  color  and  menac 
ing  wave  turned  parish  beadle. 

And  the  "ethic"  of  the  pagan  impulse? 
It  is  this:  Squander  yourself  on  the  winds, 
but  be  not  blindly  blown  along  with  them. 


THE  ETERNAL  RENAISSANCE         153 

Be  the  heart  of  the  blast.  Absolute  sub 
mission  to  life  is  absolute  mastery  of  life. 

The  emptiness  of  that  word  "progress"! 
All  life,  the  evolutionary  process,  tends  to 
dissonance,  complexity.  Differentiation  in 
itself  is  estrangement  from  the  common 
World-Root;  and  as  we  go  to  seek  the 
Great  Harmony  it  recedes  before  us.  Circle 
emerges  from  circle,  and  the  last  circle  is 
only  the  last  illusive  horizon.  Each  single 
thing  holds  the  sought  secret,  but  we  spurn 
it.  Science  sees  only  in  it  a  link  in  a  chain. 
Each  minute  is  only  part  of  an  hour,  the 
disciples  of  method  and  system  will  tell  us, 
when  in  reality  the  hour  is  the  essence,  the 
very  heart  of  the  minute.  Pluck  the  minute 
in  its  entirety,  and  the  secret  of  the  hour — 
of  all  hours — is  yours. 

The  pagan  spirit  can  never  die.  It  is  it 
self  the  instinct  to  live,  it  is  the  eternal 
knocker  at  the  door  of  the  House  of  Cir 
cumstance,  the  Voice  that  calls  in  all  cen 
turies  to  the  pursuit  of  Beauty.  It  is  the 
spirit  of  revolt  in  art  and  thought.  It  is  the 
cloven  flame  that  consumes  age  after  age 
the  citadels  of  authority  and  their  comman 
ders  sheathed  cap-a-pie  in  their  ethical 
petticoats. 


SILENCE 

THEY  who  are  won  to  silence  have 
passed  the  gaudy  gates  of  Vanity 
Fair — the  gates  that  open  outward 
to  the  Purple  Hills  of  Dreams.  They  have 
famished  'mid  plenty  and  roistered  with 
sick  heart,  and  the  noises  they  brewed  and 
the  beautiful  dreams  they  spilled  on  the 
dusty  highways  and  the  soft  lies  their  eyes 
have  told  are  no  more.  For  them  the  reign 
of  the  Real  has  begun.  In  silence  they 
hear — and  their  souls  are  the  noiseless  foot 
falls  of  the  Eternal. 

Caked  in  those  whispering  south  winds, 
burnished  by  those  eternal  suns  that  warm 
without  scorching,  swaddled  in  those  white 
wrappings,  gulfed  thus  in  the  immur- 
murous — they  are  the  supreme  critics  of 
life.  Before  the  tribunals  of  taciturnity  the 
strident  is  rapped  to  order,  and  the  gilded 
gabbler  of  the  portico  is  sentenced  to  wear 
the  motley  and  caper  with  fishwomen. 
With  shout  and  laughter  we  garnish  the 
(154) 


SILENCE  155 


days;  but  Sorrow  comes  with  finger  lifted 
to  her  puckered  lip,  and  we  are  silent;  or 
if  we  cry  aloud  it  is  where  no  one  can  hear. 

Each  action  contains  the  germ  of  a  des 
tiny;  each  action  is  a  distinct  individual  in 
embryo;  and  if  we  had  a  finer  spiritual 
organ  we  should  find  in  these  great  silences 
of  the  soul  destinies  and  embryos  and  veiled 
Fates  in  myriad  procession.  The  best  of 
us,  as  we  are,  immured  in  our  limitations, 
deafened  by  bodily  hearing  and  blinded  by 
bodily  eyesight,  can  hear  them,  sometimes, 
scratching  their  messages  on  the  walls  of 
our  being  as  they  pass  by. 

I  see  a  huge  crowd  pacing  the  boulevards 
at  midnight.  Fanfare,  pell-mell,  cackle — 
eyes  that  rove  from  point  to  point  in  anxious 
quest  of  Pleasure;  fruitless  pacings  to  and 
fro,  inutile  phrases  whispered  to  gold-sodden, 
paunchy  disciples  of  "sociability"  by  papier 
mache  women — each  soul  in  reality  yawn 
ing  at  each  other.  I  see  also  a  narrow 
room  on  the  top  floor  of  a  house  shrouded 
in  silence.  A  youth  holds  Shelley's  poems 
in  his  hand.  "Swiftly  walk  over  the  western 
wave,  Spirit  of  Night"— he  has  begun  that 
exquisite  invocation  written  by  the  Boy  of 
Spezia  Bay.  With  half-closed  eyes  he 


156  SILENCE 


treads  with  Shelley  the  western  wave  and 
is  afloat  in  the  Spirit  of  Night,  and  he  has 
heard  more  than  all  the  mottled  mobs  of 
the  boulevard,  for  he  listens,  while  the  mobs 
can  only  hear. 

To  be  mewed  in  marmoreal  silences,  to 
fall  with  sated  visage  and  cloyed  tongue 
and  a  self,  hewn  to  a  million  diversities, 
upon  this  downy  bed  canopied  and  cur 
tained  with  gauzes  and  textures  of  strange 
patterns;  to  hear  the  uproar,  tragic  in  its 
inutility,  inutile  in  its  tragedy,  dwindle  to 
a  world-buzz,  then  cease  entirely — that  is 
to  feel  the  rapture  of  calm,  the  ecstasy  of 
conscious  surcease,  a  passionate  peace. 

There  are  an  awe,  a  wonder,  a  sheen  of 
the  ethereal  in  all  fine  silences.  We  here 
breathe  upon  the  adamantine — and  the 
adamantine  is  not;  we  give  ourselves  to 
float  upon  a  far-winding  stream  tinct  with 
ancient  sunlights — a  bubble  drifting  upon 
a  greater  bubble,  blown  from  pipes  greater 
than  Pan's.  On  these  stilled  waters  we 
may  be  immersed  without  fear  of  drowning. 
It  is  immersion  without  submersion,  reality 
without  illusion — and  we  are  hidden,  yet 
seen  of  all. 

Hamlet's  silences  are  the  most  impressive 


SILENCE  157 


parts  of  the  play;  in  his  soliloquies  we  rec 
ognize  the  soul  of  the  troubled  Dane.  The 
Fates  that  lure  him  to  the  catastrophe 
evolve  their  deviltries  in  silence.  The  secret 
of  the  tragedy  is  spoken  by  no  mouth;  it 
is  a  Presence  unseen,  unheard,  but  not  un- 
felt  by  that  inner  nerve  that  responds  to 
the  Idea  in  which  the  muddied  action  of 
the  play  is  cradled. 

And  with  what  subtle,  silent  motions  do 
the  Fates  weave  their  filaments  of  adamant 
around  the  trusting  Othello — damned  by 
a  fine  virtue,  undone  by  his  own  nature, 
discovered,  routed  and  bludgeoned  to  earth 
by  an  ingrained  optimistic  faith  in  the  good 
ness  of  mankind!  lago  is  the  fiend  par 
excellence  of  dramatic  literature.  He  is 
the  quiet,  grim  architect  of  a  most  magni 
ficent  palace  of  pain.  His  sense  of  touch 
is  exquisite.  His  building  is  a  destroying. 
And  yet  in  nothing  that  he  says,  in  nothing 
that  is  heard,  do  we  discover  the  depths 
of  his  extremest  infamy.  It  is  left  to  si 
lence — to  the  imagination.  It  is  Othello 
who  goes  out  in  utter  spiritual  darkness; 
and  though  lago  is  gyved,  he  stands  tri 
umphant — and  silent.  In  that  silence  of 
lago  in  the  bedroom  of  Desdemona  the 


158  SILENCE 


Eumenides    have    paused    to    survey    their 
work.  I  ago  was  only  their  instrument. 

In  those  deep  recesses  of  our  being  where 
the  ashes  of  our  dreams  lie  inurned  in  their 
bronzed,  time-worn  receptacles;  in  those 
caverns  of  the  undersoul,  where  our  pro 
jected  but  abrogated  selves  murmur  against 
the  decree  that  has  sentenced  them  to  those 
barren  wombs;  in  all  that  past  that  is  not, 
yet  is  everlastingly,  we  recognize  something 
of  the  inarticulate,  something  that  may  not 
be  uttered  even  by  the  heart  to  the  brain. 

Ecstasy  is  mute.  Shadows  curl  around 
"I  Will,"  and  acts  are  the  undoing  of 
dreams.  "I  Will  Not"  is  bred  of  the  higher 
view.  If  it  is  cold  at  the  poles  of  ultimate 
negation,  it  is  so  only  in  spiritual  prospect. 
When  one  has  fought  his  way  there  he  has 
cast  his  laprobes  of  illusions  behind.  The 
sense  of  opposites  is  lost.  There  is  neither 
cold  nor  heat  on  those  silent  promontories; 
there  is  placidity,  the  urgency  to  rest.  The 
calm  of  a  half -humorous  disdain  bathes  us. 
The  soul  is  then  a  rendezvous  for  shadows; 
the  mind  the  Rialto  of  the  dead.  Postpone 
ments  are  postponed — and  it  is  on  the  con 
dition  of  perpetual  silence  that  Eternity 
has  made  her  assignation  with  Time. 


SILENCE  159 


Thought  laps  us  all  about  and  we  are 
hemmed  in  by  dreams.  Speech  and  act 
at  best  are  but  a  stammering.  Our  confes 
sions  to  each  other  are  mere  stutter.  The 
finest  revelations  are  made  to  ourselves. 
Who  has  never  paid  a  pilgrimage  unto  him 
self  has  never  touched  the  Kabala.  The 
Mecca  of  motion  is  Oblivion. 

Elate  youth  darts  upon  Life  and  with 
rough  hand  and  strident  voice  seizes  his 
tinselled  trophies.  He  takes  the  universe 
for  his  'scutcheon,  and  by  the  divine  right 
of  vascular  palpitation  he  claims  the  circling 
worlds.  Blatant  youth!  where  dost  thou 
run — or,  rather,  where  runnest  thou  not? 
In  mid-life  his  cries  have  withered  to  a 
whine  and  our  Don  Quixote  has  dwindled 
to  a  vinegary  critic.  His  elder  age  is  a 
discreet  silence. 

Old  age  should  hold  its  tongue.  Like  the 
walls  of  old  houses,  it  has  secrets  to  tell. 

There  is  no  soul  born  to  flesh-woof  that 
has  not  on  a  day  heard  the  drumbeat  of 
retreat  sounded  in  its  ears.  We  have  fought 
and  wept,  replied  and  defied,  but  in  the 
Unconscious  our  genius  is  chiselling  the 
Hour — that  fateful  hour  that  shall  put 
clamps  upon  our  affirmations  and  sew  up 


160  SILENCE 


our  lips  with  the  golden  threads  of  taci 
turnity.  Our  scale  of  life-values  has  been 
wrong.  The  battles  we  have  fought  have 
only  served  to  cloud  our  brains  with  the 
dust  of  combat.  We  see  we  have  been 
trying  to  measure  Eternity  by  minutes; 
thenceforth  we  shall  eternize  minutes.  We 
smile — and  take  the  veil. 

In  silence  there  is  universality.  Lonely 
souls  seek  the  solitudes  of  nature  because 
it  is  there  the  dreams  of  spiritual  liberty 
come  true.  In  these  fastnesses  are  creatures 
disburdened  of  trammels.  Winged  and 
crawling  things  empty  their  souls  of  im 
pulse  as  they  list.  In  the  wilderness  desire 
and  attainment  are  one.  The  spirit  soaked 
in  these  silences  participates  in  the  wild 
riot  of  life — riot  without  uproar;  revels 
that  are  mum;  endless  muffled  motion.  The 
soul  passes  into  all  living  things.  The 
silent  observer  becomes  the  spirit  of  the 
place,  and  his  meditations  are  spun  into  the 
crannies  of  shadows  and  the  crevices  of  un- 
apprehended  worlds. 

Here  man  regains  his  lost  kingdom  and 
sits  proudly  throned  on  Self.  He  feels 
himself  at  the  very  core  of  Being,  flush 
with  every  conceivable  future.  He  is 


SILENCE  161 


welded  into  a  One.  What  has  been  is 
jettisoned;  what  is  to  come  is  unvisored. 
It  is  Nirvana  without  annihilation.  The 
squirrel  that  darts  up  the  tree  carries  a 
human  soul  with  it,  and  the  bird  that  flies 
overhead  is  chanting  a  finer  song  than  it 
knows,  for  it  warbles  for  two.  The  forest 
dreamer  rides  on  the  crest  of  a  fiery  cloud; 
and  the  slime  on  the  tarn — that  is  he,  too. 
The  individual  is  blotted  out,  and  the  mys 
tery  of  the  One-in-Many — thenceforth  it 
is  no  mystery. 

This  is  the  only  liberty  man  can  ever 
attain,  and  the  path  lies  through  silence. 
Each  must  go  his  own  way.  There  is  a 
supreme  release  for  each,  but  two  cannot 
find  it  together.  The  unthwarted  will, 
equilibration,  quiescence,  the  suffusion  of 
dateless  days — would  these  be  yours?  Then 
rivet  yourself  to  the  silences,  put  your  ear 
to  the  dark  shell  of  Night,  and  fly  the 
hubbub. 

Man  is  a  phenomenal  fragment,  a  tem 
poral  circumstance,  a  momentary  coagula 
tion  of  debris  on  the  infinite  stream  of 
Being.  His  personality  is  dispersed  in 
death  and  meditation.  In  the  vast  upper 
silences  the  infantile  I  of  daily  blab  fades 


162  SILENCE 


like  the  shadow  of  a  dream.  The  whole 
universe  of  things  lies  stretched  before  us 
like  islets  in  an  ocean.  The  radiating 
streams  of  Time  flow  back  to  their  sources 
and  drag  with  them  the  bubble  ages. 

Like  a  Greek  naked  and  sweaty  from  the 
games  who  plunges  into  a  cooling  stream, 
so  we,  sweaty  and  distraught,  fresh  from 
the  satanic  saturnalias  of  action,  may 
plunge  into  the  lustral  calms,  the  healing 
silences — and  forget. 


POSTERITY:   THE   NEW 
SUPERSTITION 

THE  latest  decoy  set  up  by  the  inde 
structible  god  of  illusions  is  Poster 
ity.   Man  has  been  invited  to  live  for 
various  motives.     Once  it  was  for  the  glory 
of  God.     Comte  proposed  as  a  motive  the 
glory  of  man.     Now  we  are  invited  to  live 
for  the  glory  of  Posterity.    Nietzsche  called 
Posterity   the    Overman;    socialists    call   it 
"the  rising  generation." 

No  one  has  thought  of  the  glory  of  liv 
ing  for  the  sake  of  living,  of  eating,  fight 
ing,  reproducing  merely  because  they  give 
pleasure.  Always  there  are  devil-gods  that 
call  for  sacrifices ;  always  there  is  the  bogey- 
word  that  demands  obeisance  and  tribute 
of  all  our  actions.  Nothing  must  be  allowed 
to  exist  for  itself.  Each  thing  must  exist 
for  the  sake  of  some  other  thing.  The  per 
fume  in  a  rose  is  only  legitimate  if  there 
is  a  human  nostril  somewhere  to  be  intox 
icated;  and  the  perfume  of  our  acts  and 
(163) 


164  POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION 

thoughts  is  only  a  "moral"  or  a  * 'right" 
perfume  if  it  gives  pleasure  to  the  nostrils 
of  God,  Church,  the  Common  Good,  or 
Posterity. 

Man  has  not  yet  become  a  good  animal. 
He  suffers  from  ideals,  as  he  once  suffered 
from  superstitions.  An  ideal  is  a  super 
stition  in  court  clothes.  It  makes  very  little 
difference  whether  you  believe  that  an  east- 
wind  blowing  down  the  chimney  on  a  moon 
light  night  will  bring  you  good  luck  or  that 
an  act  that  gives  you  pleasure  in  the  doing 
is  "right"  if  it  benefits  Posterity  and  wrong 
if  it  doesn't. 

The  East  worships  its  ancestors ;  the  West 
worships  Posterity.  The  East  lies  prone 
on  its  belly  offering  tributes  to  ghosts; 
the  West  bows  its  head  in  adoration  to  the 
ghosts  not  yet  born.  When  an  Oriental 
worships  the  soul  of  a  bit  of  wood  we  call 
him  superstitious;  when  the  Westerner 
worships  certain  letters  of  his  alphabet 
which  spell  "God"  or  "Church"  or  "Moral 
ity"  or  "Posterity"  we  call  it  the  Ideal. 

And  a  smile  steals  over  the  brow  of  Puck 
and  Momus  reels  in  glee. 

Ancestor-worship  is  the  old  superstition; 
posterity-worship  the  new  superstition.  The 


POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION  165 

old  bottles  are  filled  with  the  new  wine, 
but  the  old  labels  have  never  been  taken  off. 
We  still  march  under  mottoes  and  tramp 
to  Ultima  Thule  to  the  raging  tom-toms 
beaten  by  priests  and  idealists.  Still  we 
signal  a  host  of  imaginary  beings  with  the 
gaudily  colored  pocket-handkerchiefs  of 
our  latest  trumpery  abstraction. 

All  these  words  that  man  bows  before 
one  after  another  in  his  flight  across  the 
face  of  Time  are  born  of  the  idea  of  Re 
sponsibility,  that  somewhere  there  is  Some 
thing  that  is  taking  cognizance  of  all  his 
acts  and  will  bring  him  to  account  for  them. 
Sometimes  it  is  the  bearded,  concrete 
Jehovah  of  the  Jews;  now  it  happens  to  be 
a  beardless,  visageless,  vaguely  shadowed 
Posterity.  The  idea  of  responsibility  is  as 
universal  as  all  other  illusions — the  uni 
versality  of  an  idea  or  instinct  merely  proves 
its  universality.  From  the  feeling  of  re 
sponsibility  sprung  the  most  immoral  and 
strength-destroying  doctrine  that  we  know 
of — the  doctrine  of  the  Vicarious  Atone 
ment. 

Responsibility  to  God  was  the  first  great 
necessary  lie — for  if  the  race  is  to  be  pre 
served  (no  one  has  ever  found  a  rational 


166  POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION 

reason  why  it  should  be)  lies  are  more  nec 
essary  to  its  growth  and  sustenance  than 
truths.  Responsibility  to  God — or  gods — 
was  the  first  ideal,  the  birth-boards  that 
clamped  and  twisted  the  brain  and  soul  of 
healthy  self-centred  beings  and  changed 
their  centres  of  gravity  from  the  enkernelled 
Self  to  an  all-seeing,  all-recording  Nonentity 
that  had  a  name  but  no  local  habitation. 

Man  is  born  in  his  own  incalculable  ante 
rior  images,  but  he  came  to  believe  in  his 
all-ignorance  that  he  had  been  created  in 
the  image  of  another,  a  giant  jail-warden 
who  allowed  him  to  rove  the  earth  at  his 
pleasure  under  a  heavy  bail-bond  to  keep 
the  peace.  The  idea  of  an  eternal  responsi 
bility  to  this  abstraction  germinated  the 
first  seeds  of  man's  moral  weakness,  para 
lyzed  his  activities,  sickened  him  with 
scrupulosities  and  filled  him  with  the  con 
sciousness  that  healthy  activity  was  sin. 
War  began  within  him,  a  war  between  his 
superb  irresponsible  instincts  and  the  idea 
of  a  vicarious  responsibility,  and  out  of 
that  shambles  issued  the  whining  Christian, 
the  lord  of  tatters  called  the  Idealist,  and 
that  mincing  prig,  Conscience. 

The  idea  of  responsibility  to  God  began 


POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION  167 

to  wane  with  the  dawning  suspicion  that 
man  was  not  a  celestial  but  a  sociological 
animal.  Conceiving  himself  to  be  this  new 
thing,  he  now  invented  a  new  kind  of  re 
sponsibility  called  "social  responsibility." 
The  old  mask  was  being  repainted.  The 
phrase  "social  well-being"  was  hoisted  into 
the  Ark  of  the  Covenant  of  Lies.  An  act 
was  now  good  or  bad  as  it  affected  the  com 
munity.  Man  loved  his  neighbor  for  the 
responsibilities  he  could  shoulder  on  him; 
the  corner  ballot  box  was  the  Kabala;  the 
community  had  power  to  bless  or  curse  the 
individual.  God  had  become  a  town-hall 
orator;  the  Recording-Angel  had  become 
a  court -reporter.  The  era  of  the  State-Lie 
had  begun. 

The  transition  is  easy  from  the  cant  about 
living  for  the  sake  of  "doing  good  in  the 
community"  and  "benefiting  the  whole" 
to  the  ideal  of  living  for  the  sake  of  poster 
ity.  The  old  obscure  doctrine  of  blood  sacri 
fice  reappears  in  this  new  posterity  super 
stition,  slightly  attenuated  and  shorn  of 
its  immediate  and  more  obvious  savage 
characteristics ;  but  the  old  trail  of  responsi 
bility  and  life-guilt  is  there. 

We  are  told  to  live  for  the  sake  of  pos- 


168  POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION 

terity,  we  must  breed  for  posterity,  eat  for 
the  sake  of  posterity,  be  moral  for  the  sake 
of  posterity,  dress  hygienically  for  the  sake 
of  posterity,  and  even  die  when  necessary 
for  the  sake  of  posterity.  We  legislate  for 
posterity,  rear  a  child  with  an  eye  to  pos 
terity,  tinker  with  the  social  system  for  the 
sake  of  posterity,  tamper  with  individual 
liberty  for  the  sake  of  posterity,  construct 
Utopias  for  the  sake  of  posterity,  vote  the 
socialist  ticket  for  the  sake  of  posterity. 

It  is  the  fetich,  the  Moloch,  the  Golden 
Calf  of  our  civilization.  We  who  are  liv 
ing,  palpitating  in  the  flesh  and  blood  pres 
ent  have  no  rights;  the  ego  is  not  sufficient 
unto  itself;  we  are  only  straws  to  show 
which  way  the  sociological  and  evolutionary 
winds  are  blowing;  we  are  only  the  bricks 
and  mortar  that  shall  go  to  build  the  mar 
vellous,  fantastic,  phantasmal  edifice  to 
house  that  coming  Holy  Family — Posterity. 
Our  deeds  have  no  value  unless  they  feed 
the  bulging  belly  of  incalculable  non-exist 
ent  tomorrows.  We  are  only  as  scraps  of 
bone  and  meat  tossed  to  that  fugitive  glut 
ton,  the  Future,  by  pasty-souled  Idealists 
and  the  spineless  altruists  who  poison  life 
with  their  doctrines  of  responsibility  and 


POSTERITY:  THE  NEW  SUPERSTITION  169 

hoax  the  feminine  with  their  metaphysical 
Cardiff  Giants. 

We  are  to  be  systematized,  badged,  classed, 
grooved,  wired,  stuffed.  Our  instincts,  our 
very  marrow,  are  to  be  inoculated  by  the 
virus  of  altruism  and  our  faces  beatified 
with  the  forerunning  rays  of  tjie  great 
Posterity  Light.  How  we  are  to  glow  with 
the  shine  of  "right  living" — all  because  the 
altruistic  quacks  with  their  obsessions  of 
Succubas  and  Incubae  have  dreamed  a  new 
dream  which  they  call  Posterity! 

Weak,  impotent,  helpless  before  the  im 
movable  present,  man  salves  his  sore  spot 
with  hopes  for  the  future.  Not  being  able 
to  regulate  his  life  today,  he  promises  him 
self  a  virtuous,  vicarious  tomorrow.  Not 
daring  to  set  up  his  Ego  as  God  and  its  end 
less  pleasure  as  sufficient  motive  for  all  his 
acts,  he  sets  up  an  Alter  Ego  and  calls  it 
Posterity,  as  he  once  called  it  God,  then 
the  State  or  the  Community. 

With  ecstatic  eye  and  lolling,  anticipatory 
tongue  he  awaits  for  his  happiness  in  Pos 
terity — something  no  one  has  ever  seen, 
something  no  one  can  define,  something 
that  could  not  possibly  exist. 


AN   EVAPORATING   UNIVERSE 

THERE  are  those  who  will  look  up 
at   that   great   round    clock   without 
a  circumference  called  the  Universe 
with  its  two  hands — Time  and  Space — of 
infinite  length  and  pretend  to  tell  you  the 
exact  time! 

The  older  we  grow  the  less  we  know.  As 
the  years  roll  over  us  we  become  more  dog 
matic  about  the  few  things  we  do  know,  and 
it  is  this  dogmatism  that  is  mistaken  for 
wisdom,  just  as  a  deep,  matured  voice  is 
often  mistaken  for  brains. 

The  fruit  of  all  knowledge  is  not  know 
ing,  but  doubt.  If  we  will  one  single  ac 
tion  long  enough  its  contrary  will  be  born. 
A  truth  will  not  bear  prolonged  study. 
First  it  begins  to  look  ridiculous;  then  it 
disappears  into  something  else.  Knowledge 
seekers  are  wave-chasers. 

The  believer  is  allowed  his  little  illusion. 
He  is  a  comic  shape.     He  is  set  in  limits, 
mortised  in  his  mania,  specialized,  forever 
(170) 


AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE         171 

mummified.  God  and  the  Devil  both  smile 
at  him  indulgently.  But  the  unbeliever — 
the  Seeker  prowling  across  the  Eternities, 
the  Wanderer  who  rejects  and  passes  on — 
is  the  tragic  shape  at  which  neither  God 
nor  the  Devil  laughs.  They  know  that  if 
in  some  unimaginably  remote  being-shape 
this  unbeliever  should  happen  on  the  thing 
he  seeks  both  Valhalla  and  Nibelheim  will 
crumble.  The  little  comic  shape  prinked 
out  in  his  cock-surety  goes  straight  to 
heaven  when  he  dies — and  so  ends.  But  the 
other  lives  in  hell  here  and  hereafter.  And 
that's  why  the  Twin  Powers  never  smile. 
We  know  that  the  character  of  our 
dreams  when  asleep  is  wholly  determined 
by  certain  subjective  conditions — that  they 
are  frightful,  beautiful,  obscure  as  certain 
organs  of  the  body  are  affected.  In  the  same 
way  the  whole  external  universe — with  its 
endless  moving  panorama  of  trees,  stars, 
animals,  our  own  bodies — is  determined 
for  us  by  subjective  conditions.  The  uni 
formity  of  nature  is  nothing  but  uniformity 
of  brain-structure.  The  external  world  is 
a  dream — more  coherent,  it  is  true,  than  the 
brain-pictures  of  the  night — but  the  coher 
ence  is  a  matter  of  degree  only,  for  the  laws 


172         AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE 

of    coherence    are    rooted    in    the    mind. 

Could  we  stand  at  the  core  of  things  we 
should  see  no  difference  in  kind  between 
that  vision  of  height,  solidity  and  sublimity 
which  when  standing  at  its  base  at  high 
noon  we  call  Mont  Blanc  and  the  vision  of 
Mont  Blanc  in  sleep.  We  transfer  to  the 
senses  what  properly  belongs  in  conscious 
ness.  The  perfume  of  a  flower  is  not  in  the 
olfactory  nerves,  but  in  the  brain.  Per 
fume  is  a  form  of  consciousness ;  so  are  light 
and  heat.  The  proof  of  this  is  in  the  fact 
that  anaesthetics  abolish  for  us  the  whole 
universe,  while  stimulants  that  fire  the  brain 
heighten  our  consciousness  of  it.  Dreams 
are  nothing  but  blood  stimulation — brain- 
expansion — and  the  universe  of  motion  and 
matter  exists  under  the  scalp. 

Thus  to  adjust  ourselves  properly  to  the 
amazing  fugacity  of  things  we  must  re 
main  sceptics.  The  intellect  at  least  should 
be  sceptic;  emotion  should  build  itself 
some  great  object  of  faith — even  if  it  be 
but  faith  in  the  grandeur  of  the  sceptical 
intellect. 

Opinion  is  Pride  and  Prejudice  scrawling 
their  justification  on  the  walls  of  the  brain. 

If  you  stare  at  a  truth  too  long  it  will 


AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE        173 

become  an  error.  We  should  blink  continu 
ally.  Truth  is  not  a  thing,  but  an  aspect. 
You  must  catch  it  off  guard  by  continually 
playing  'possum. 

Life  evaporates  when  we  attempt  to  seize 
it.  What  is  the  tangible  if  not  a  state  of 
consciousness  ? 

The  survival  of  an  idea — religious,  philo 
sophical,  ethical — one  that  survives  age 
after  age  through  infinite  changes  and  vicis 
situdes,  may  prove  that  idea  to  be  a  uni 
versal  truth  or  may  prove  that  the  soil  in 
which  that  idea  has  grown  is  incapable  of 
improvement.  Damp  cellars  will  always 
produce  fungus — and  damp  cellars  are  im 
mortal  things.  What  is  fit  survives;  what 
ever  serves  is  true ;  but  fitness  is  antithetical 
to  universality,  and  that  which  serves  can 
never  be  the  Absolute.  So  the  longest 
surviving  truth  has  nothing  in  common 
with  the  Truth. 

The  sublime  and  the  ridiculous  adhere 
in  the  same  object.  They  are  mental  states, 
points  of  view — not  different  things.  The 
action  that  at  twenty  we  thought  sublime, 
at  sixty,  with  deeper  insight,  has  become 
ridiculous.  An  inhabitant  of  the  moon 
could  see  nothing  sublime  in  its  aspect.  To 


174        AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE 

sacrifice  our  life  for  another  is  ridiculous 
from  nature's  point  of  view,  for  nature 
knows  nothing  of  individuals.  "What  differ 
ence  does  anything  make?"  asks  the  cynic, 
thus  turning  all  things  into  objects  of  ridi 
cule.  Still,  the  question  is  sublime! 

The  desire  to  do  good  is  the  source  of 
all  the  evil  in  the  world.  In  attempting 
to  better  our  condition  we  add  to  the  com 
plexity  of  things.  Like  a  man  caught  in 
a  soft  bog,  the  more  frantic  his  efforts  to 
extricate  himself  the  deeper  he  sinks.  In 
the  eye  of  nature  a  good  impulse  is  merely 
so  much  force  which,  coming  into  contact 
with  another  force,  may  generate  a  third 
force  that  will  cause  more  pain  than  the 
original  "good"  force  sought  to  suppress. 

A  pessimist  is  a  man  who  sees  life  as  it 
is.  To  present  any  aspect  of  life  as  it  is  in 
itself  through  the  medium  of  art — that  is, 
with  the  highest  degree  of  impersonality 
that  a  mind  still  in  the  flesh  can  attain — 
is  necessarily  to  have  one's  self  stamped 
a  pessimist.  Hence,  the  disinterested  seeker 
after  truth  is  always  the  pessimist,  the 
alarmist,  the  iconoclast.  The  optimist  is 
never  concerned  with  truth,  or  things  in 
themselves — he  is  only  concerned  with  the 


AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE         175 

status  quo  and  its  preservation.  He  is  a 
chubby  soul  with  visions,  or  a  lean  soul 
who  is  a  victim  of  monomania.  An  ele 
mental  truth  is  always  a  painful  one  be 
cause  the  bases  of  the  world  are  a  hunger 
of  some  sort. 

Ibsen's  stark  souls  who  stand  shivering 
in  the  rush  of  inexorable  forces,  Nietzsche's 
pitiless  psychology,  gnawing  with  ravenous 
tooth  at  the  rotten  timbers  of  civilization; 
Gorky's  perfet  incisions,  De  Maupassant's 
fine  ironic  gesture — all  these  strike  terror 
to  parochial  souls.  But  to  tell  the  truth 
about  things  is  not  necessarily  to  be  a  pes 
simist.  Every  increment  of  power  is  an  in 
crement  of  life.  To  know  the  elemental 
truths  and  to  stand  calmly  by  the  world's 
stink-pots,  to  watch  with  calm,  unimpas- 
sioned  eye  and  record  with  calm,  unimpas- 
sioned  pen  or  brush  the  workings  of  our 
futile  passions  react  upon  our  souls  and 
tonic  us  for  battle.  The  man  who  looks 
under  the  lids  of  the  world  gains  in  mental 
ruggedness  what  he  loses  in  color. 

For  a  man  to  see  life  as  it  really  is  he 
should  spend  a  year  in  a  madhouse,  a  year 
in  a  hospital,  a  year  in  a  jail,  and  a  year  in  a 
tomb.  In  the  madhouse  he  will  come  to 


176         AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE 

understand  practical  life,  in  a  hospital  he 
will  see  the  soul  of  man  as  it  slowly  turns 
and  writhes  on  its  bed  of  needles,  in  the  jail 
he  will  come  to  comprehend  the  meaning  of 
universal  necessity  and  catch  upon  his  ear 
the  wail  from  the  depths  of  things,  in  the 
tomb  he  will  meet  Change  the  Comedian. 

Then  he  will  be  prepared  to  think. 

Mankind  are  like  flies  that  have  settled 
on  a  giant  Gymnast.  His  novel  feats  we 
call  the  miraculous;  his  habitual  contor 
tions  we  call  Law. 

And  then  so  glibly  men  speak  of  growth! 
Endless  growth  is  an  eternal  and  simul 
taneous  advance  of  each  4esire  toward  every 
point  of  a  circle  that  widens  to  infinity. 
That  is  the  irony  of  all  movement. 

Universal  unhappiness  is  caused  by  the 
inability  of  infinite  appetite  to  subsist  on  a 
finite  number  of  crumbs. 

The  life-happiness  (or  unhappiness)  of 
the  individual  is  a  purely  arithmetical  prob 
lem.  Each  one  of  us  could  work  the  problem 
out  to  his  entire  satisfaction — that  is,  if  he 
knew  the  kind  of  multiplication  table  the 
Unknowable  is  using. 

There  is  a  cold  so  intense  that  we  come 
to  believe  it  is  warmth.  There  is  a  terror 


AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE         177 

that  numbs.  Sharp  pain,  by  causing  us  to 
swoon,  abolishes  pain.  There  are  truths 
so  great  that  if  presented  to  us  suddenly 
we  instantly  recognize  them  as  delusions. 
There  are  such  tragic  possibilities  in  our 
each  act  that  if  pondered  over  long  enough 
they  will  evoke  a  smile.  Thus  do  all  things 
pass  into  one  other;  opposites  turn  out  to 
be  aspects,  and  aspects  the  relations  of  x 
to  x. 

Philosophical  scepticism — Pyrrhonism — 
is  the  tendency  of  the  mind  to  ubiquity.  The 
finest  minds  are  attracted  to  every  point  in 
the  Circle — they  are  the  arch-susceptibles. 
The  greatest  mind  sees  all  things  from  all 
standpoints  in  one  single  act  of  intuition — 
it  feels  a  propulsion  from  its  every  center 
to  every  conceivable  other  center. 

Why  should  I  go  ghost  hunting,  for  who 
has  explained  man?  Where  is  there  a 
haunted  house  that  can  compare  with  this 
universe  before  me? 

Where  are  there  rappings  and  creakings 
such  as  I  hear  around  me  here  in  this 
strange  place  of  mind  and  matter — and 
earth  and  sea?  Where  are  there  more  won 
derful  apparitions  than  these  billions  and 
billions  of  ghosts  of  flesh  and  force  called 


178        AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE 

men  and  women  that  have  risen  from  this 
eternal,  immeasurable  Desire  in  things? 
What  sudden  translation  and  disappearance 
more  unaccountable  or  monstrous  than  this 
lapse  into  death?  This  is  the  Haunted 
House  of  Life  in  which  we  move  around, 
and  each  single  being  is  but  a  wraith  above 
his  own  grave. 

Sanity  is  the  completest  view  of  the  com- 
pletest  mind,  an  instantaneous  vision  of 
each  thing  from  all  possible  sides.  Com 
plete  sanity  makes  for  the  negative  attitude 
toward  life,  just  as  the  concentration  of  a 
mind  on  a  single  idea  to  the  exclusion  of 
all  other  ideas  tends  to  narrowness,  mono 
mania,  insanity.  All  positive  men  are  pas 
sionate  men  because  they  are  not  developed 
mentally.  The  Indian  yogis,  Pyrrho,  Mon 
taigne  were  the  sanest  of  men.  Beware 
of  knowing  only  one  thing  and  knowing  it 
well.  In  its  limits  the  rabbit  is  master  of 
the  thing  it  knows  best. 

We  speak  about  "the  great  crises  of  his 
tory,'*  which  are  purely  imaginary  crises. 
Time  works  her  really  great  changes  si 
lently,  is  her  own  critic,  and  records  nothing 
of  importance.  Sleep  is  crisis,  waking  is 
crisis;  each  turns  on  its  own  pivot,  and  the 


AN  EVAPORATING  UNIVERSE        179 

great  things  are  no  matter,  and  history  is 
the  chronicle  of  sleepwalkers.  Only  Illusion 
is  eternal. 

Victory  is  always  disastrous.  It  is  the 
moment  of  disillusion. 

Nature  is  not  a  series  of  Laws.  Nature 
is  infinite  readjustment.  An  eternal  Law 
is  only  an  adjustment  that  has  lasted  a 
long  while. 

Irony  is  an  acid  pity,  the  despair  of  the 
brain,  an  iron  mask  that  impotent  tender 
ness  sometimes  puts  on  to  seem  the  bravo. 

Looking  forward  at  twenty  we  say,  "We 
are  Destiny."  Looking  backward  at  sixty 
we  say,  "We  have  been  Destiny's  work." 
That  illusion  of  twenty  was  the  most  im 
portant  part  of  her  work.  Destiny  we  may 
never  know;  but  we  may  know  her  masks. 
As  force  she  masks  as  Free-Will,  as  Evil 
she  masks  as  Goodness.  She  is  Necessity 
dominoed  as  Pride. 

To  look  on  the  trees  and  the  sunlight  a 
little  while,  to  read  a  sage  or  two,  to  medi 
tate  and  wonder  at  that  which  is  forever 
vanishing,  to  sleep  upon  her  breasts  a  night 
or  two — then  quietly  to  slip  away,  still 
young,  still  swollen  with  unbirthed  desires: 
that  is  to  taste  life,  that  is  to  know  all. 


THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM 

THE  human  ego  is  an  organ  with  a 
hundred  pipes  and  one  stop — Death. 
Life  is  Death's  dream.    Our  nature 
is  rooted  in  the  Unconscious,  and  our  life 
is   but   a   little  waking   from   that   eternal 
swoon.     The   brain   is   never  anything   but 
the  organ  of  dreams,  and  our  body  with 
its     endless     anatomical     subdivisions     is 
nothing  but  a  huge  tentacle  of  a  Shadow. 

Do  men  come  back  from  the  tomb?  Aye, 
for  the  Unconscious  is  a  tomb  and  all  of 
us  who  breathe  move  and  dream  now — 
all  who  say  they  are — are  merely  reappear 
ances,  uneasy  shapes  moving  across  the 
blurred  vision  of  the  Great  Syncopated 
God. 

The  irony  of  life!  the  irony  of  death! 
For  only  the  dead  are  satisfied,  and  they 
would  not  be  satisfied  if  they  were  conscious 
of  their  satisfaction.  In  that  midnight  of 
silence  they  dream  not,  and  never  comes 
to  them  the  bitter  ecstasies. 
(180) 


THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM  181 

The  irony  of  birth  I  the  birth  of  a  child 
is  the  triumph  of  death.  At  the  moment  a 
new  being  comes  into  the  world  a  grave 
somewhere  stands  empty. 

The  day  is  a  bitter  almond;  the  night  a 
vision  of  falsehoods — and  the  bitter  truths 
of  open-eyed  sentiency  and  the  fantastic 
jigging  in  the  brain  we  call  our  dreams  are 
alike  fictions,  solved  and  drowned  all  at 
last  in  that  grotesque  reality — Death. 

Indeed,  has  not  Hegel  said  that  to  live  is 
a  kind  of  blasphemy? 

The  one  fact  is  Pain;  all  other  facts  are 
factors.  The  great  central  soul  of  things 
temporal  is  an  unquenchable  Pain,  and  the 
great  central  soul  of  things  extra-temporal 
is  a  supreme  indifference.  Pain  creates;  in 
difference  absorbs.  And  when  the  Supreme 
Indifference  has  absorbed  all  of  Pain  sorrow 
will  be  no  more,  and  when  sorrow  is  gone 
the  universe  will  disappear. 

The  worst  ill  that  can  befall  me  is  more 
easily  realized  by  the  imagination  and  is 
known  by  the  intellect  to  be  more  probable 
than  the  greatest  good  fortune.  The  worst 
is  always  probable;  the  best  is  often  not 
even  possible.  So  in  mentioning  some  great 
potential  misfortune  we  always  preface  it 


182  THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM 

with  the  fear -begotten  prayer,  "which  God 
forbid."  But  the  smile  of  incredulity  is 
never  very  far  from  our  dreams  of  felicity. 
The  Eternal  has  packed  its  mighty  secrets 
in  our  pains,  and  if  our  cosmic  memories 
were  as  profound  as  our  cosmic  experiences 
we  would  never  hope.  Our  roots  are  be 
neath  us,  but  the  flower — the  mind — is  born 
anew  in  each  life  and  dies  with  that  life. 
The  elder  dreams  revisit  us  at  certain  un 
expected  moments  in  our  lives,  and  it  is 
then,  in  a  single  moment,  we  nail  truth,  and 
see  the  unimaginable  woe  in  things,  the  uni 
versality  of  anguish,  the  giant,  writhing 
spectres  of  the  things  we  have  been.  Pluck 
from  that  moment  its  gift  of  wisdom,  or 
forever  live  the  dupe  of  the  Impossible  I 

For  what  is  this  lapse  between  two  eter 
nities  we  call  life?  Life  is  a  myth  and  a 
mirage.  The  past  never  existed.  We  have 
clothed  a  few  mean  facts  in  a  tawdry  rem 
iniscent  fancy.  Our  memories  of  childhood 
are  not  the  same  as  the  childhood  we  re 
member.  Our  youth  is  a  sunken,  lost  At 
lantis;  but  when  we  lived  that  youth  it  was 
commonplace — oh,  so  commonplace!  The 
future  is  a  mirage  woven  of  dreams.  What- 
might-have-been  is  the  mother  of  fantasy. 


THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM  183 

Or,  life  is  a  series  of  endlessly  recurring 
dreams.  That  dream  which  recurs  oftenest 
we  style  mathematical  truth ;  the  dream  that 
comes  but  once  in  a  thousand  years  we  call 
a  miracle. 

What  have  we  of  light?  The  more  light 
there  is  in  the  world  the  blacker  grows  the 
encircling  gloom.  Increase  of  light  does 
not  mean  decrease  of  darkness.  You  cannot 
clip  anything  from  the  Infinite.  If  knowl 
edge  is  infinite  the  recesses  from  which  it 
is  quarried  are  infinite.  The  stalactylic 
thought-formations  grow  more  and  more 
brilliant  as  we  move  farther  and  farther 
into  the  caves  of  consciousness;  but  it  is  be 
cause  the  darkness  is  profounder,  not  be 
cause  the  crystals  are  brighter. 

And  the  lip-wisdom  of  science!  The  "uni 
formity  of  Nature"  is  merely  the  uniformity 
of  a  belief.  A  thing  observed  by  all  peo 
ples,  at  all  times,  under  all  circumstances 
is  still  rooted  in  credence,  and  not  in  cer 
tainty,  and  possesses  no  greater  claim  to  be 
the  truth  than  one  thing  observed  by  one 
man,  at  a  single  moment,  under  a  single  set 
of  circumstances.  Truth — if  Truth  there 
be — does  not  lie  in  multiplicity,  but  in 
vividness  of  insight.  That  the  sun  will  rise 


184  THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM 

and  set  tomorrow  is  not  so  certain  in  my 
mind  as  that  the  process  of  its  rising  and 
setting  is  inane,  inutile.  What  I  know  of  a 
process  is  of  less  importance  to  me  than 
what  I  see  in  that  process. 

We  know  nothing  of  Law.  We  hear  its 
reverberations  as  it  thunders  through  the 
soul  or  catch  its  shadow  on  our  retina  as 
it  weaves  the  dawn  or  evanesces  in  the  mys 
tery  of  death;  but  the  thing  itself  cannot 
be  laid  hold  of.  Experience  is  hearsay, 
seeming.  It  is  the  same  with  thought.  As 
in  the  physical  world  no  two  bodies  can 
ever  touch,  so  in  the  soul  world  no  being 
ever  touches  his  thought.  Between  him 
and  his  highest  thought  there  is  a  chasm 
which  even  his  imagination  cannot  bridge. 
It  is  girdled  by  a  sacred  fire  that  holds  him 
at  bay.  Into  its  centre  man  can  never 
penetrate.  We  but  lie  in  its  shadow.  And 
man  himself  is  but  one  of  the  infinite  num 
ber  of  shadows  cast  by  the  syncopated 
breathing  of  the  Shadow-Maker,  the  myth- 
weaver,  who  reigns  excarnate  in  Eternity, 
who  is  everlastingly  and  who  everlastingly  Is. 

Stability  eludes  the  net  of  thought.  We 
seek  stability  in  change,  and  when  it  comes 
as  Death  we  flee  from  it  in  terror. 


THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM  185 

Time  baffles  like  a  dream.  Time  is  but 
the  slime  left  by  the  slugworm  of  Circum 
stance  as  it  crawls  lazily  over  the  white 
eternities. 

Our  acts  ridicule  our  thoughts.  The  last 
sin  to  die  will  be  Pride  because  it  is  the 
first  and  greatest  virtue.  Everything  that 
is  born  with  an  ego  has  pride;  those  who 
affirm  life  do  it  through  pride;  those  who 
seek  death  do  it  through  a  greater  pride; 
those  who  battle  do  it  through  pride;  those 
who  renounce  in  sackcloth  and  ashes  are 
ill  of  great  pride.  All  is  pride  and  a 
vanity  and  a  mockery.  And  the  first  virtue 
was  the  first  sin.  Distinctions  are  circum 
stantial.  Behind  all  masks  of  time  and 
place  there  is  the  grimace  of  Mephisto. 

Say  aloud  but  once,  "I  am  happy!" — 
whisper  it  to  the  air,  whisper  it  into  the 
night,  murmur  it  to  thy  pillow,  and  already 
the  navvies  have  razed  the  edifice,  the  fiends 
are  at  their  sculduggery.  Happiness  and 
consciousness  are  at  war.  The  lids  always 
lie  closed  over  the  eyes  of  Happiness;  her 
lashes  are  fine  needles;  you  cannot  rape  her 
sight  with  impunity. 

Ideas — Plato's  verities — are  at  last  as 
dust.  Ideas  grow  senile  and  slumber  and 


186  THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM 

die  and  lie  in  their  graves  for  long  ages  and 
come  again  in  the  garb  of  youth  and 
slaughter  and  slay  and  liberate;  and  this 
death  and  resurrection  go  on  throughout 
all  time.  In  Time  there  is  nothing  new; 
and  Eternity  is  neither  new  nor  old. 

Who  shall  sleep  and  dream  not?  In  what 
a  place  are  the  Ideas  housed!  What  a  slum's 
lodging-house  is  the  brain  of  man!  What 
strange,  ragged,  unshorn  thoughts  take  up 
their  home  there  in  the  night,  and  slink 
away  in  the  morn,  maybe  never  to  return; 
what  loathsome-visaged  impulses  take  up 
their  bed  and  board  there!  And  sometimes 
there  come  wan,  pale  wayfarers  who  seem 
to  bear  about  them  the  griefs  of  ageless  days 
and  who  flit  away  as  they  came — like  ghosts 
in  the  dawnlight. 

Ideas  reflect  only  the  temporal  order — 
that  grim  and  grimy  rent  in  Eternity. 

For  we  are  the  ligatures  of  a  Relation. 
When  dream  and  deed  are  one  then  self- 
consciousness  will  disappear.  When  emo 
tion,  intellect  and  act  are  knit  into  such  a 
unity  that  the  joints  and  seams  have  dis 
appeared,  then  comes  the  Man-God — then 
will  the  Ideal  be  made  real  and  the  Real 
be  the  Ideal. 


THE  TRAIL  OF  THE  WORM  187 

Vain  dream!  It  is  the  war  of  wills  that 
breeds  limitation,  and  so  long  as  there 
is  limitation  there  is  Pain,  and  pain — the 
severance  of  dream  from  deed — brings  us 
back  to  self -consciousness. 

The  waters  are  lifted  to  the  moon,  but 
will  never  reach  the  moon — so  our  dreams 
tend  to  deeds,  but  they  ever  remain  dreams. 


COSMIC  MARIONETTES 

AL  the  great  novelists  are  fatalists. 
Admission  or  denial  on  their  part 
is  beside  the  question.     The  man 
who  believes  in  free  will  is  a  fatalist.  He 
is    temperamentally    what   he    is.    Fate    is 
mental  squint;  it  is  the  angle  of  vision,  a 
viewpoint,  physical  compulsion. 

Balzac  called  himself  the  "Secretary  of 
Society,"  and  his  books  are  but  an  inven 
tory  of  its  forces.  These  forces  he  incar 
nated  and  called  human  beings.  He  thought 
the  human  soul  could  be  identified  with 
electricity,  and  conferred  on  it  about  as 
much  free  will  as  he  would  have  accorded 
any  other  kind  of  battery.  From  his  Jovian 
heights  he  surveyed  the  movements  of  these 
galvanized  figures;  recorded  their  attrac 
tions  and  repulsions ;  pulled  them  apart  and 
showed  us  their  insides;  and  made  you  feel 
when  he  had  finished  his  task  that  his  brain 
was  the  House  of  Life,  and  we  the  wonder 
children  of  his  creation.  His  men  and 
(188) 


COSMIC  MARIONETTES 189 

women  drift  hither  and  thither  on  the 
soundless  sea  of  Being,  while  the  viewless 
gods  of  the  deep  are  the  masters  of  the 
currents. 

Thackeray  is  always  taking  you  aside 
and  explaining  the  way  he  does  the  trick. 
He  brings  each  of  his  characters  into  life 
with  a  drag  on  him — the  drag  of  having 
to  be  himself.  All  of  Thackeray's  creations 
carry  this  air  of  compulsion  with  them. 
They  are  hand-me-down  human  beings, 
and  wear  the  look  of  long  ill-usage.  In 
the  nature  of  things  Beatrix  Esmond  must 
become  the  Baroness  Bernstein.  She  seems 
to  expect  some  such  destiny,  and  accepts 
it  with  delicious  sang-froid.  Foker  is — just 
Foker ;  he  eoudn't  possibly  be  anybody  else, 
and  Dobbin  we  know  has  been  Dobbin 
from  all  eternity.  Thackeray's  belief  in 
an  overruling  Destiny  was  so  profound 
that  his  gentle  soul,  half -frightened  at  his 
conclusions,  was  always  casting  around  for 
ways  and  means  to  let  the  old  Gorgon 
down  easily. 

Turgenev's  characters  are  gripped  in  a 
vise.  They  go  through  life  like  somnam 
bulists.  Bazaroff  is  an  arsenal  of  tenden 
cies.  Liza  is  a  mediaeval  nun  that  by  some 


190 COSMIC  MARIONETTES 

curious  freak  has  been  revamped  for  nine 
teenth-century  consumption.  Her  soul, 
shocked  by  the  secular  and  buffeted  by  the 
trivial,  sought  again  the  cloistral  glooms 
of  the  nunnery. 

Hardy's  and  Meredith's  characters  are 
of  a  piece.  The  searing  breath  of  life  blows 
with  equal  force  in  their  pages.  Spiritual 
resistance  is  fate  working  from  the  other 
side.  Chloe  was  blasted  from  within;  Tess 
was  blasted  from  without. 

Zola's  fatalism  is  more  pronounced  than 
any  of  these  masters  of  fiction.  This  is 
because  of  the  stress  he  lays  on  heredity 
and  environment.  His  mission  was  to 
assort  our  souls  and  pigeonhole  them.  He 
was,  indeed,  the  Claude  Bernard  of  imag 
inative  literature.  Blood,  nerve,  cell — there 
you  are.  Pick  out  good  forebears,  for  you 
are  the  wraith  of  a  dead  man.  You  are 
integrated  matter  in  the  process  of  redis 
tribution.  The  history  of  your  atoms  is 
the  history  of  your  soul.  You  "elect"  to 
lead  a  drab  life;  but  your  resolution  counts 
for  nothing;  some  day  it  shall  melt  like 
wax  in  the  fires  of  sudden  desire.  The 
future  is  an  ogre;  it  is  the  past  that  slays. 

Zola's    miscroscopic    eye,    his    piercing 


COSMIC  MARIONETTES 191 

glances  into  the  subsoil  of  life,  are  nowhere 
better  exemplified  than  in  his  masterwork, 
"L'Assommoir."  It  is  a  fine  study  of  the 
subtle  laws  that  damn.  The  connection  be 
tween  an  injured  foot  and  a  drunkard's 
death — where  is  it?  That's  the  art  of  it. 
Moral  logic  there  is  none;  but  there  is  an 
intellectual  logic.  The  links  in  the  chain  of 
causation — the  connection  between  Cou- 
peau's  physical  and  mental  fall — were 
forged  by  a  cunning  Fate. 

Our  lives  are  steeped  in  these  subtleties. 
Each  moment  is  big  with  ante-natal  pur 
pose.  Our  characters  are  pieced  together 
by  trifles  that  escape  observation,  and  the 
way  of  our  degradation  is  fixed. 

Focus  the  mind  for  one  moment  on  this 
world  of  the  great  novelists.  What  a  piece 
meal  pageant!  What  a  carnival  of  marion 
ettes!  What  cosmic  mummery!  Tentative 
men  and  women;  alleged  lives;  souls  barely 
basted  to  a  body ;  suggestions ;  thin  pipings ; 
the  unevolved  elemental;  stumps  and  ends 
and  shreds  and  butts  of  beings. 

Here  in  this  bogus  earth-world,  in  this 
slimy  Malebolge,  everything  is  planned; 
nothing  is  completed.  These  children, 
tethered  to  the  Iron  Ring  of  Necessity,  eat 


192 COSMIC  MARIONETTES 

the  cake  of  hope;  the  brown  bread  of  the 
tangible  is  thrown  into  the  street.  We  are 
starving  today,  but  it  will  always  rain 
manna  tomorrow! 

Are  these  creations  aught  but  somnam 
bulists  who  walk  in  the  brains  of  their  crea 
tors? — and  are  we  of  flesh  and  blood  aught 
but  somnabulists  who  walk  in  the  dream- 
cells  of  a  hidden  god?  These  master-dream 
ers,  these  wraith-workers — will  they  wake 
at  the  cock-crow  of  Eternity?  Nay,  they 
are  bubble-blowers  as  we  are  bubble-blown; 
they  are  not  voices,  they  are  voiced;  and 
Charles  Bovary  was  as  "real"  as  Napoleon 
Bonaparte. 

These  men  who  sketch  life  are  used.  They 
submit  their  souls  to  the  spirit,  and  their 
characters  move  in  the  grooves  of  inexor 
able  law.  No  man  knows  what  he  does; 
no  great  novelist  ever  knew  what  he  was 
writing.  His  fingers  clutch  the  pen,  but 
the  writing  is  mere  copying;  the  original 
is  in  the  nature  of  things.  His  brain  is 
nothing  more  than  a  phonograph ;  he  is  a 
notary  of  the  spirit,  a  transcriber  of  the 
Law,  a  scrivener  of  the  gods,  an  assorter 
of  junk. 

Destiny  works  through  the  intellect,  and 


COSMIC  MARIONETTES 193 

the  seers  of  life  are  subalterns.  They  sail 
under  sealed  orders.  They  live  with  the 
Great  Gamer  ado,  but  not  on  equal  terms. 
He  is  hidden — behind  a  pebble,  it  may  be. 
You  may  kick  it,  but  He  smiles — for  He  is 
the  kick. 

The  author  of  "Madame  Bovary"  was 
Madame  Bovary.  Flaubert  was  her  secre 
tary. 


THE  DRAMA  OF  DAYS 

A  DAY!  From  the  first  opalescent 
slur  on  the  horizon  to  the  last  fire- 
flecked  cloud  that  hangs  on  the 
last  sunray,  shot  up  from  the  abysm  into 
which  the  sun  has  fallen,  on  through  the 
span  of  ebon  we  call  the  night  till  the 
moment  when  that  opalescent  slur  again 
slinks  over  the  horizon — what  things  are 
spun  for  us  in  that  time! 

Time  is  a  coxcomb,  and  the  days  are  his 
many  vestments.  Days  are,  again,  the 
calendar  of  Chance,  the  dial  of  our  sorrows 
and  revolts  and  joys. 

In  youth  each  day  is  a  golden  scabbard 
from  which  we  drag  a  glittering  sword  to 
conquer  some  imaginative  domain.  In  age 
each  day  is  but  another  fold  in  a  winding- 
sheet  that  muffles  a  gray,  out-running  uni 
verse. 

In  that  subtle   ebb   of  the   spirit   which 

we  call  memory  there  stand  out  gauntly,  like 

shoals  that  rise  from  the   ocean   after   its 

flood,   days  that  were  memorable  in  their 

(194) 


THE  DRAMA  OF  DAYS 195 

events,  days  with  the  shine  and  shimmer  of 
some  triumph  on  their  brows  or  with  the 
bitter  record  of  some  reprisal  of  Chance 
branded  on  their  cheeks.  Then  it  is  that 
imagination,  in  that  look  backwards,  per 
sonifies  the  days,  giving  to  arbitrary  divis 
ions  of  time  this  or  that  quality,  breathing 
bitter  breaths  into  their  thence  corporate 
selves,  conferring  on  that  little  congerie  of 
minutes  and  seconds  the  qualities  of  malig 
nity  or  buoyancy,  placing  in  their  hands  a 
wand  or  a  knout — giving  thus  to  pleasure 
and  pain  a  place  on  the  calendar. 

The  spume  of  imagination  covers  the  past, 
and  we  carve  in  that  passion  of  retrospec 
tive  self-conservation  these  little  salient 
time-pegs  whereon  to  hang  the  rags  and 
tatters  of  memory.  Wonder-children  that 
we  are,  the  eternal  revenants  of  the  indis 
soluble  Spectre,  it  is  thus  we  breathe  the 
breath  of  life  into  our  old  selves  and  mul 
tiply  our  ghosts  and  replenish  our  empty 
mental  wardrobes. 

On  such  a  day — now  that  the  years  have 
pelted  us  we  see  it — Destiny  came  to  us 
spying  from  it$  lurk-hole  in  a  trifle.  We 
have  come  to  know  that  little  things  decide ; 
big  things  are  only  decisive. 


196 THE  DRAMA  OF  DAYS 

Each  second  has  a  sliding  panel  over  its 
surface;  behind  it,  in  its  lair,  sprawls  the 
Sphinx,  scrawling  in  the  slime  of  circum 
stance  our  future  days. 

That  day  we  laughed  and  we  were 
doomed  on  that  very  day;  this  day  we 
groaned  and  we  were  elected  to  joy.  We 
know  not  what  we  do — we  only  know  what 
we  have  done. 

Time  is  a  moth  that  settles  and  nibbles 
where  the  dust  has  gathered.  There  are 
monstrous  gaps  in  our  days.  We  are  lucky 
if  ten  days  in  each  year  are  saved  to  our 
memory.  That  grave-like  taciturnity  be 
tween  remembered  days!  To  memory  and 
identity  it  is  just  as  though  one  had  not 
been.  And  sometimes  from  the  depths  of 
the  Unconscious,  from  that  unfathomable 
sea  whereto  we  are  finally  ushered, 
there  will  start  up,  like  the  re-evocation  of 
lost  islands,  a  day  long  forgotten,  with  still 
its  shroud  about  it  and  the  unerased  tints 
and  hues  of  death  still  on  its  body.  The 
time-sea  tosses  up  many  a  strange  pebble 
on  these  naked  coasts  of  abandoned  days. 

It  is  hard  to  segregate  a  day  in  memory. 
The  emotions  and  dreams  —  knowing 
nothing  of  the  mechanical  inventions  that 


THE  DRAMA  OF  DAYS 197 

man  has  fabricated  to  keep  himself  posted 
on  the  progress  he  is  making  toward  the 
tomb — are  fluid,  blend  and  link  themselves 
by  finer  bonds  than  calendared  tallies. 

All  our  past-remembered  life  makes  a 
series  of  lakes  in  the  mind,  or,  rather,  pools 
wherein,  with  head  reverted,  we  see  only 
mirrored  epochs  in  our  wayfaring.  The  day 
we  lay  on  the  grass,  and  looking  up  at  the 
heavens,  suddenly  guessed,  by  a  quick 
amalgamation  in  consciousness,  the  illusive- 
ness  of  all  creation,  the  impossibility  of  ever 
finding  the  relation  of  the  finite  Me  to  the 
infinite  It — this  does  not  seem  to  have 
happened  on  a  day — really,  it  was  only  a 
minute  in  that  day — but,  related  to  our 
future  spiritual  existence,  it  happened  in 
a  cycle  set  apart  for  us  by  our  destiny.  The 
rough  clutch  of  Memory  dragging  that  im 
memorial  minute  higher  and  higher  above 
the  seas  of  mnemonic  oblivion  as  the  years 
go  by  has  inflated  and  transfigured  that 
minute  in  that  May  or  June  day  to  gigan- 
tesque  proportions. 

For  the  ego  marks  off  its  history  on  sun 
dials  and  moon-dials  that  begin  at  the  Greek 
Kalends. 

And  yet  we  hold  to  dates  and  days.  They 


198 THE  DRAMA  OF  DAYS 

are  the  timepieces  of  intelligence,  and  we 
use  them  till  the  dust  of  death  clogs  the 
works.  It  is  the  ineradicable  instinct  for 
the  tangible  that  sends  us  back  over  our 
tracks  seeking  the  specific  day  for  this  or 
that  adventure  or  revelation.  Our  feet  are 
moored  to  the  concrete  however  much  our 
heads  bob  in  the  timeless  ether. 


ABSORPTION:    A  UNIVERSAL 
LAW 


A~JL  life  is  absorption  —  a  sucking  up, 
a  blending  of   forces.     Absorption 
and   dissipation  are  the   laws   that 
govern  all  the  processes  of  the  organic  and 
the  inorganic  worlds.    I  say  absorption  and 
dissipation,  but,  properly  there  is  nothing 
but  absorption.     Dissipation  is  but  absorp 
tion  seen  from  the  other  side. 

The  sun  dissipates  heat  and  light,  but 
the  earth  consumes  both.  Moving  bodies 
pulse  their  vibrations  into  the  atmosphere, 
and  the  atmosphere  is  lost  in  ether.  The 
seed  drops  to  the  earth  and  is  lost  in  the 
soil;  the  oak  comes  forth  and  in  time  passes 
into  decay,  and  is  soil  again,  and  seed  again, 
and  oak  again.  In  the  gaseous  flames  of 
the  nebular  orb  a  universe  of  force  is  ab 
sorbed,  and  from  the  flaming  retort  of  fire 
it  is  belched  forth  into  infinite  space 
in  forms  new  and  strange,  to  be  absorbed 
again  by  withered  worlds  and  passion-spent 
spheres. 

(199) 


200    ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW 

A  mighty  and  consuming  thirst  pervades 
things.  Naked  forces  skirt  the  topmost 
heavens  and  the  nether  depths  of  the  seas, 
seeking  to  be  clothed,  hooded,  wrapped, 
shod,  absorbed  in  matter.  Who  are  the 
dead  but  those  who  have  absorbed  life,  who 
in  coffined  silence  await  new  unions  in 
mystic  spheres?  Who  are  the  quick  but 
those  who  have  come  to  this  plane  to  absorb 
planetary  life  and  its  myriad  pulsing 
streams  of  sentiency?  Indeed,  are  the  live 
aught  but  the  peelings  and  tailings  of  an 
cestral  existences — pale,  wan  relics  of  the 
dead,  vibrant  wraiths,  trailing  after  them 
the  forces  and  tendencies  of  their  ancient 
lives  ? 

The  living  breathe  and  move  and  have 
their  being  because  they  have  absorbed 
their  dead  past  selves,  because  they  have 
passed  through  unimaginable  modes  of  life 
and  sucked  into  their  souls  the  breath  of 
the  past.  They  stand  before  us  mere 
echoes,  sounding-boards  on  which  a  note  or 
two  of  the  Great  Diapason  is  registered. 
As  a  sponge  sucks  up  water,  so  do  we  suck 
up  life.  Our  eyes  suck  in  the  colors  and 
forms  of  the  material  world;  our  ears  suck 
in  sounds,  our  palates  suck  in  tastes,  our 


ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW    201 

nostrils  suck  in  odors.  These  sense-ducts 
flow  to  the  brain,  carrying  their  flotsam  and 
jetsam  of  impressions,  and  in  that  won 
drous  and  ever-mysterious  alembic  the  raw 
materials  which  the  senses  furnish  are  ab 
sorbed,  minced,  blended,  and  from  the  magic 
cells  flow  those  complex  ideas  that  give  us 
"The  Eve  of  Saint  Agnes,"  or  "Mona 
Lisa." 

What  is  that  vast  dream  that  underlies 
the  somnambulism  of  the  ages?  What  is 
that  Idea  which  coheres  through  incoherency 
and  stands  forever  calm  through  cosmic 
clash?  What  is  it  for  which  the  seer  has 
pined,  the  saint  has  prayed,  and  the  de 
votee  has  wrought?  Absorption — reabsorp- 
tion  in  the  One.  Names  differ;  tendencies 
do  not  change.  And  whether  we  be  Bud 
dhists  and  accept  the  idea  of  the  non-per 
sonal  Divine  Intelligence  that  is  the  sub 
stratum  of  the  phenomenal  world,  where 
phantoms  squeak  and  gibber  and  call  it 
life;  or  we  believe  in  the  One  of  Pythagoras 
and  Plato,  or  we  accept  the  Christian  meta 
phor  of  the  Father;  or  we  yearn  for  the 
Pure  Being,  or  Non-Being,  of  Hegelianism, 
or  crave  for  immersion  in  the  Oversoul  of 
Transcendentalism — whether  it  be  any  one 


202    ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW 

of  these,  it  is  reabsorption  we  are  conscious 
ly  or  unconsciously  seeking.  It  is  this  in 
tuition  that  is  the  basic  concept  of  all  reli 
gions  and  religio-philosophic  systems. 

"Absorption  in  God"  is  the  primary  in 
stinct  of  the  religious  soul  and  the  last  hope 
of  man.  The  temporal  order  is  built  of  ex 
pediency;  its  construction  has  been  piece 
meal;  its  forms  are  transitory.  It  is  a  mere 
stop -gap  between  Eternity  and  Eternity. 
It  is  a  buffer  state.  Built  in  time,  grounded 
in  the  shifting  sands  of  Change  and  Cir 
cumstance,  it  is  destined  to  die  with  the 
planet. 

It  is  the  widest  generalizations  we  crave. 
Science  does  not  crawl  from  point  to  point; 
it  circles  from  generalization  to  generaliza 
tion.  Each  ending  is  but  a  beginning,  and 
each  outermost  an  interior.  The  horizon 
broadens  with  our  ascension.  Line  merges 
into  line,  circle  into  circle,  cycle  into  cycle, 
and  still  the  press  is  ever  forward.  We 
believe  we  are  absorbing,  while  in  reality 
we  are  being  absorbed.  We  believe  we 
are  discovering,  while  in  truth  we  are  being 
discovered.  With  each  new  obstacle  sur 
mounted,  the  under,  hidden  private  Self 
circles  into  broader  life.  We  pierce  the 


ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW    203 

chrysalis  of  our  last  limitation  and  believe 
that  in  sloughing  it  off  we  are  discarding 
it.  But  the  Great  Thaumaturgist  never 
discards  anything.  The  new  is  the  old  re 
vamped.  The  skin  we  slough  off  drops 
silently  into  the  Unconscious,  where  it  is 
remoulded  nearer  to  the  heart's  more 
urgent  desire.  It  emerges  transfigured  as 
our  present  self.  The  mind,  like  the  heart, 
has  its  systole  and  diastole.  We  escape  into 
higher  forms  of  life  by  daily  dying  unto 
ourselves. 

In  society — that  vast  and  complex  net 
work  of  organized,  objectified  Will^— this 
all-powerful  law  of  absorption  is  seen  at 
work  pursuing  as  relentlessly  and  as  in 
exorably  its  obscure  end  as  in  the  purely 
physical  or  psychic  world.  The  individual 
is  cancelled  in  the  family,  the  family  ab 
sorbed  in  the  tribe,  the  tribe  obliterated  in 
the  nation. 

The  social  unit  cannot  escape  the  fate 
that  awaits  it.  As  surely  as  the  needle 
turns  toward  the  pole  does  part  overlap 
part  and  the  segmental  become  indistin 
guishable  in  the  whole.  This  law  that  passes 
up  through  the  circles  of  social  change  is 
today  apparent  in  the  commercial  world. 


204    ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW 

We  hear  much  in  denunciation  of  the  trusts, 
those  giant  combinations  of  capital  that 
absorb  the  small  dealer  and  dangerous  com 
petitor,  not  by  main  force,  but  by  a  pro 
cess  as  legitimate  and  as  inexorable  as  the 
drop  of  rain  is  absorbed  into  the  sea  or  the 
dew  in  the  atmosphere.  The  trust  is  our 
widest  commercial  generalization — the  in 
stinct  of  the  sublime  manifesting  itself  in 
the  world  of  give-and-take.  As  the  great 
nations  of  the  earth  assimilate  the  smaller 
ones,  and  they,  in  turn,  assimilate  the  tribes 
within  their  borders,  so  the  great  purveyors 
of  the  necessaries  of  life  are  drawing  into 
their  hands  the  means  of  production  and 
the  machinery  of  distribution  of  the  whole 
commercial  world. 

The  logical  question  now  that  forces  it 
self  on  the  mind  is :  Why  not  let  the  nation 
instead  of  the  individual  do  this?  Why  not 
make  the  nation  a  trust  and  the  people  the 
trustees?  Why  not  absorb  these  giant  cor 
porations  into  the  fabric  of  the  State,  and 
put  the  stamp  of  approval  on  a  law  that 
will  have  its  way,  willy-nilly?  This  is  the 
dream  and  the  jargon  of  socialism.  It  is 
founded  on  the  incontrovertible  proposition 
that  all  things  tend  toward  a  common 


ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW    205 

centre,  no  matter  how  great  may  appear 
to  be  their  surface  diversity  and  differen 
tiation  from  a  common  standard.  It  is  this 
that  makes  socialism  right.  It  is  founded 
on  the  law  of  absorption,  my  euphemism 
for  murder. 

No  one  thing  can  long  remain  wholly  in 
dependent.  A  human  being  may  rise  to 
indefinite  heights  on  the  rungs  of  his  en 
vironment;  but  in  these  altitudes  the  air  is 
difficult  to  breathe.  Gravitation  tugs.  Man 
channels  his  own  descents.  A  remorseless 
Nemesis  pursues  those  who  rise  above  the 
common  level.  The  ligature  which  binds 
man  to  man  in  works  and  days  cannot  be 
dissolved  with  impunity.  There  are  mo 
ments  in  life  when  the  individual  may,  like 
Ibsen's  Master  Builder,  achieve  for  a  mo 
ment  absolute  Selfhood,  but  his  fate  is 
written  on  the  scroll  of  natural  law,  and 
from  his  dizzy  height  he  will  be  dashed  to 
atoms.  The  ideal  of  absolute  individualism 
aims,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  at 
achieving  this  quixotic  independence.  At  the 
basis  of  individualism  lies  the  competitive 
system.  Man  competes  against  man,  and 
achieves  power  and  place — or  poverty  and 
death. 


206    ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW 

And  thus  are  all  things  woven  of  one 
thread.  Who  shall  trace  the  curvetings  of 
Law?  Circle  on  circle  towers  above  our 
heads  in  rhythmic  windings.  Whorl  upon 
whorl  rises  above  us,  and  its  mystic  spirality 
is  lost  in  the  Unapparent. 

Our  souls  are  engulfed  for  an  aeon  or 
two  but  to  reappear  on  the  curved  surface 
of  consciousness.  Like  vigorous  swimmers 
who  plunge  beneath  the  watery  avalanche 
only  to  rise  sound  and  whole  on  th^  placid 
surface  beyond  the  breakers,  so  do  we  sport 
in  the  eternal  forces.  As  an  eagle  circles 
round  and  round  over  unknown  seas,  so 
we  rise  higher  and  higher  on  the  crest  of 
the  laws  that  have  ferried  us  hither  and  that 
shall  ferry  us  beyond.  Microcosm  melts 
into  macrocosm;  the  less  flows  molten  into 
the  greater ;  the  trivial  dissolves  in  the  signi 
ficant,  and  through  all  the  Will  is  pro 
mulgated. 

In  spouting  mud  and  elemental  mist — the 
Dream  of  Absorption  was  there;  in  pale 
ozoic  slime — the  Dream  was  there;  in  the 
boundless  underworld  of  instinct  and  blind 
procreation — the  Dream  was  there.  Belt 
and  buckle  and  chain  have  burst  and  fallen 
into  the  past;  belt  and  buckle  and  chain 


ABSORPTION:  A  UNIVERSAL  LAW    207 

are  forged — and  the  Dream  persists.  When 
the  earth  shall  be  hooded  in  flame  and  its 
poles  capped  and  shod  in  vapor — the  Dream 
will  be  there. 

Plunging  from  birth  to  rebirth,  the  soul 
of  Man  gnaws  and  files  at  his  gyves.  Limi 
tation  he  recognizes  as  his  one  enemy. 
Through  storm  and  bloom  and  the  press 
of  circumstance  he  seeks  to  clasp  the  Ultra- 
Generalization.  Systems  and  codes  he 
sloughs  off  like  snake-skin.  Time  and  space 
wilt  in  the  breath  of  his  Desire.  He  labors 
to  force  the  Northwest  Passage  to  the  Polar 
Seas  of  Quiescence.  He  ponders  on  his 
latest,  newest  route  to  the  Indies  of  Pas 
sivity. 

Absorption  is  God's  method — God,  who 
is  the  last,  the  final  Equilibration,  the  Spent 
Dynamic,  the  Eternal  Static. 


ACATALEPSY 

THE  doctrine  of  the  Acataleptics  was 
the  doctrine  of  the  incomprehensibil 
ity  of  things.  Pyrrho  is  the  supreme 
acataleptic  among  the  ancients.  Anatole 
France  is  the  supreme  acataleptic  among  the 
moderns.  All  opinion  is  heretical.  To  say  "I 
know"  is  to  put  the  stamp  of  ignorance  on 
one's  self.  If  catalepsy  is  a  possession, 
acatalepsy  is  the  state  of  ultimate  freedom. 
It  is  a  condition  of  transcendental  ignor 
ance.  The  brain  of  the  acataleptic  is  an  Eye 
that  through  an  eternity  of  time  focuses  its 
vision  in  an  infinite  number  of  directions. 
The  world  is  a  whimsy.  Nothing  can  be 
proven,  nothing  can  be  disproven. 
"Eureka!"  was  uttered  by  a  madman. 

Acatalepsy  is  the  ecstasy  of  indifference. 
It  is  the  Nirvana  of  knowledge.  Pyrrho 
lived  in  a  world  without  longitude  or  lati 
tude.  The  "I  think,  therefore  I  am"  of 
Descartes  would  have  been  written,  "I 
think,  therefore  I  only  think  I  am"  by 
(208) 


ACATALEPSY  209 


Pyrrho.  At  the  touch  of  this  Prospero  of 
negations  the  dogmas  of  the  world  crumble 
to  dust  and  the  dear  truths  we  have  nuzzled 
on  our  bosoms  turn  to  fantastic  mockeries. 

Flux  and  reflux,  eternal  transition — 
what  do  we  know?  Belief  of  any  kind  is  a 
species  of  hypnosis.  Certainty  is  the  super 
stition  of  the  senses.  Time  is  an  illusion. 
Eternity  is  a  word.  Each  thing  is  only  a 
mask  for  some  other  thing.  Names  are  the 
placards  we  put  on  incomprehensible  ob 
jects.  Nature  winks  at  us  slyly.  There  is 
a  Rabelaisian  hilarity  on  the  face  of  the 
external  universe,  as  if  it  would  say, 
"Presto!  Behold  me!  Behold  me  not!  Hold 
tightly  to  your  possessions,  man;  whatever 
is  is  not.  That  is  my  supreme  jest." 

This  monster  of  gullibility,  man,  believes 
in  what  he  sees  and  touches — that  it  is  just 
that  thing,  and  nothing  else!  He  arranges 
his  beliefs  just  as  he  arranges  his  clothes 
in  his  wardrobe.  His  world  is  as  definite 
as  a  map  for  a  townsite.  His  God  could  be 
stowed  away  in  a  bandbox. 

The  eternal  Sancho  Panza  on  his  ass  of 
Certitude!  He  munches  his  brown  bread 
and  cheese  in  the  Garden  of  Hesperus.  He 
picnics  in  the  empyrean.  He  shambles  over 


210  ACATALEPSY 


the  stars.  He  is  the  vulgar  Knower.  He 
moves  in  an  incomprehensible  Mystery. 
But  he  never  suspects.  His  universe  is 
solid  and  substantial.  His  brain  is  a  yard 
stick.  In  the  great  hurricane  of  atoms  he 
cautiously  raises  a  parasol  called  a  creed. 
"It  is  ten  o'clock,"  "It  is  noon,"  he  says. 
How  does  he  know?  It  is  forever  the  Hour 
of  the  Eternal. 

The  sceptic  is  a  bankrupt  who  through 
all  eternity  cannot  rehabilitate  himself.  In 
No-Man's-Land  he  is  a  Sultan.  The  nets 
woven  by  the  system-makers  will  never 
strangle  him  in  their  folds.  Through  the 
walls  of  all  the  granite  superstitions, 
whether  they  are  scientific,  political  or  reli 
gious,  he  passes  like  a  ghost.  He  is  the  mys 
tic  of  realism. 

If  Shakespeare  created  a  world,  Mon 
taigne  destroyed  a  sidereal  system.  Only 
the  absurd  is  true.  The  senses  lie,  the  brain 
lies,  consciousness  lies.  How  do  we  know 
they  lie?  Because  another  lie  says  so. 

The  acataleptic  glance  melts  the  light 
of  the  stars  and  puts  out  the  sun.  Acata- 
lepsis!  In  the  retorts  of  its  brain  it  melts 
cosmologies  and  gods.  It  puts  its  finger 
on  Death  and  says,  "Not  proven."  It  puts 


ACATALEPSY  211 


its  ear  to  the  heart  of  Life  thundering  in 
its  Gargantuan  hulk  of  matter  and  says, 
"Thou  art  only  a  seeming." 

Crescent  and  Cross,  Scarabee  and  Dra 
gon  fuse  and  evaporate  in  the  mighty  men 
struum  of  this  alchemic  ironist.     One  folly 
is  pitted  against  another  folly,  one  mon 
strous    illusion    rises    to    confront    another 
monstrous  illusion.    The  iron  gates  of  God 
are  papier  mache.     ^Plato's  Eternal  Ideas 
are  plaster  par  is.     Brahma  is  painted  fog. 
The  celestial  seraglios  of  Mohammedanism 
are    sacrosanct    pigsties.       The    Christian 
"Mansion  in  the  Skies"  is  in  cinders.  The 
Kingdom  of  God  is  a  fading  mirage  that 
even  the  dying  are  no  longer  able  to  con 
jure  up.   The  Jehovah  of  the  Jews  is  a  Big 
Wind.    The  First  Cause  of  theology  is  a 
spite-wall.    The  Ego  of  the  Romantics  is  a 
huge   dummy   swollen  taut   with   flatulent 
German  metaphysics.  Anarchism,  Socialism, 
Protestantism,    Agnosticism,    Manicheism, 
Buddhism  are  the  tabulation,  consolidation 
and   fulmination   of  mental   and  tempera 
mental  disorders.    They  are  the  passing  in 
carnations    of    the    Incomprehensible,    the 
scoffing  incantations  of  the  immortal  Maya ; 
the  radiant  revelations   of  the   Immanent 
Yawn. 


212  ACATALEPSY 


In  the  omnipotent  orgy  of  ideas  the  acata- 
leptic  preserves  an  indulgent  passivity. 
While  the  battle  rages  he  polishes  a  spy 
glass.  He  belongs  to  no  army.  He  is  not 
interested  in  the  outcome.  Only  the  spec 
tacle  enchants.  His  brain  is  ascetic;  his  eye 
is  gluttonous.  Over  the  earth  go  the 
armies — over  the  earth  and  into  the  earth. 
He  is  at  Troy,  at  Waterloo,  at  Gettysburg, 
at  Verdun — there  is  always  a  Bloody  Angle 
in  the  combat  of  concepts  where  the  fray 
is  the  most  picturesque.  It  is  all  the  horse 
play  of  ants  on  a  star.  Aristotle  and  Plato, 
Spinoza  and  Hobbes,  Leibnitz  and  Scho 
penhauer,  Pascal  and  Nietzsche — these  are 
merely  the  gigantic  oscillations  of  one  pen 
dulum. 

Doctrines  flow  from  the  agy  ill  of  per 
sonality.  To  be,  to  think,  to  know  was  the 
primordial  heresy. 

This  little  man,  this  little  man,  who  comes 
a-whining  into  the  world  to  solve  the  riddle 
of  Being!  This  self -constituted  aide-de-camp 
to  the  Infinite !  This  sculpted  piece  of  proto 
plasm  who  with  arms  akimbo  buzzes  his 
prejudices  into  the  ears  of  the  Sphinx! 
This  choreboy  of  a  blind  Will  who  believes 
he  is  moulding  stars! 


ACATALEPSY  213 


Mahomet  went  to  heaven  on  a  white  mule, 
another  rode  into  Jerusalem  on  an  ass,  and 
still  another  who  had  Aladdinized  the  world 
rode  to  death  on  Rosinante.  All  symbols! 

Ah!  If  the  sceptics  dared  laugh  to  their 
fill!  The  stars  would  founder  in  space  at 
the  uproar  and  atoms  and  potencies  still 
unborn  would  age  in  their  nothingness. 

The  petrified  smile  on  the  face  of  the 
ironic  Nihilist  is  a  smile  that  is  a  weapon. 
All  the  bobbing  hobby-horses  on  the  merry- 
go-round  of  religion  and  philosophy  come 
to  a  standstill  and  their  riders  sit  motion 
less  when  the  Unbeliever  is  seen  standing 
at  the  door.  He  is  the  grand  dissociator 
of  ideas,  the  surgeon  of  illusions,  a  snow 
that  blankets  all  growing  things. 

Your  dreams? — he  skins  them  alive.  Your 
God? — he  splits  it  into  an  infinite  number 
of  particles  and  hands  you  back  a  hatful 
of  waste.  He  is  a  magician.  He  can 
transform  matter  into  force  and  force  into 
matter,  and  both  into  the  incomprehensible. 
He  makes  a  witches'  broth  out  of  all  the 
materials  of  human  thought  and  brews  from 
them — nothing,  except  it  be  his  petrified 
smile  or  the  glint  of  malice  in  his  eye. 

The    idol-makers  fabricate    through    the 


214  ACATALEPSY 


aeons.  There  are  plaster-cast  images  and 
images  in  bronze  and  images  built  of  ebon 
and  adamant.  But  an  end  is  made  to  all 
of  them  with  the  bare  bodkin  of  incredulity. 

"What  do  I  know?"  asks  Montaigne. 

"Just  that,"  answers  Pyrrho  from  his 
tomb. 


CODA 

THE  Jews  gave  us  Jehovah,  a  fan 
tastic  old  man  of  thunders  and 
scourges,  as  testy  as  King  Lear  and 
as  childish.  The  Mohammedans  gave  us 
Allah,  who  punishes  with  fire  and  rewards 
with  flesh;  an  ironic,  hot-blooded,  Fal- 
staffian  God  who  acts  as  a  "bouncer"  in  a 
celestial  seraglio.  Christianity  gave  us  the 
symbol  of  Calvary  with  its  pale  God  nailed 
between  two  thieves — which  conveys  this 
truth:  Law  and  order  come  first;  mendi 
cant  gods  and  thieves,  take  notice ! 

Olympus  was  an  aristocracy.  Sublime, 
cruel,  satanic,  merciful — these  supermen 
and  superwomen  of  the  Greek  imagination 
were  based  in  life  itself.  They  were  the 
personifications  of  real  aspirations  and  pas 
sions.  They  were  bubbles  blown  from  pipes 
of  clay  by  beings  who  loved  the  world,  the 
flesh  and  the  beautiful.  And  so  no  matter 
how  far  these  bubbles  went  into  the  empy 
rean  they  still  pictured  the  earth,  its  forti- 
(215) 


216  CODA 


fying  hells  and  its  redemptive  pains  and  the 
sex-aura — worn  not  as  a  shroud  as  in  the 
Christ-myth,  but  as  a  garment  of  glory. 
Olympus  was  a  place  of  quality,  the  Ver 
sailles  of  the  imagination;  not  a  Vatican  of 
diseases  or  a  mausoleum  of  canonized 
corpses  or  apotheosized  renunciants  of  ques 
tionable  manhood. 

Olympus  was  beautiful.  There  was  there 
no  stench  of  skulls,  no  reek  from  the  unaired 
beds  of  Allah's  houris,  no  insipid,  simpering 
asexual  angels  whose  whole  eternity  was 
spent  in  telling  God  the  time.  There  were 
air  and  light  on  Olympus.  A  cosmology 
was  here  raised  to  the  dignity  of  a  sport. 
Whichever  way  you  turned  you  faced  the 
Beautiful.  Whatever  door  you  tapped 
opened  on  the  Infinite.  Every  step  on 
those  heights  was  like  a  magical  levitation. 

Mysterious,  suggestive,  equivocal,  in  pas 
sing  through  the  great  Greek  myth  the 
imagination  throws  out  its  flaming  colored 
shafts  from  its  zenith  to  its  nadir.  Every 
thing  is  fecund  on  those  heights.  Death 
is  the  one  inconceivable  thing.  Homer  and 
Aeschylus  and  Plato  and  Sophocles  have 
been  there  before  you.  No  matter.  In  that 
world  every  poet  is  a  pioneer.  The  eyes 


CODA  217 


of  those  gods  never  say  the  same  thing 
twice  because  their  brains  never  focus  twice 
in  the  same  direction. 

Those  giant  mosaics  of  a  spent  race !  How 
many  millions  collaborated  in  the  evolu 
tion  of  those  dreams?  What  mind  put  the 
first  tint  of  that  stupendous  vision  on  the 
dead  palette  of  Reality?  Who  was  that 
Rembrandt  with  the  drop  of  transfiguring 
color  in  his  brain?  Who  was  that  Phidias 
who  chiselled  with  his  brittle  dream  the 
brow  of  Apollo?  Who  was  that  Michael 
Angelo  who  charted  in  imaginative  ecstasy 
that  ether-capped  Olympus  that  was  to 
eject  from  its  mysterious  ovum  gods  and 
goddesses  as  long-lived  as  the  star  which 
fostered  them? 

Against  that  monstrous  background  of 
the  Unknown  that  man  in  all  ages  gashes 
with  the  lightning  of  his  thought  Olympus 
stands  out  unalterable  in  time,  a  master- 
work  of  alto-relievo  whose  sculpted  figures 
are  posed  for  eternity.  The  tears  of  Christ, 
flowing  for  two  thousand  years  from  the 
unknown  heavens  whereto  he  ascended, 
have  not  washed  away  that  breedy  world 
of  antique  thought. 

Christ  lives.  Aphrodite  reigns! 


218  CODA 


The  Gods  of  Greece  were  not  an 
ambulance  corps.  Olympus  was  not  a  dis 
pensary.  To  be  carried  into  the  presence 
of  Zeus  on  a  stretcher  was  no  aid  to  im 
mortality.  Paganism  did  not  seek  to  amend 
nature  or  cleanse  God.  It  personified  the 
real.  Facing  life  with  every  sense  agape, 
it  uttered  a  lyrical  amen.  Bounding  from 
the  heart  of  the  ageless  Mother,  it  uttered 
a  hosannah  to  the  Sun. 

Paganism  was  dynamic.  It  took  the  part 
of  the  eternally  pulsating  atom  against  the 
frosty  glamour  of  Nirvana.  It  struck  to 
gether  the  cymbals  of  victory  over  the  grave. 
It  would  have  held  Dyonisiac  revels  on 
Golgotha,  and  on  him  who  was  pinioned  to 
the  wooden  Caucasus  on  that  mount  it 
would  have  bound  eglantine  and  over  the 
crown  of  thorns  it  would  have  strewn  rose- 
leaves.  It  threw  dice  with  Destiny,  know 
ing  that  Destiny  is  a  blackleg.  To  lose  or 
win — there  is  no  difference.  To  have  lived 
and  to  have  played  the  game — that  is  the 
glory.  Power  and  Beauty,  Ecstasy  and 
Frenzy,  a  riant  diabolism,  the  sense  of  a 
weltering  joy — that  was  the  Pagan  meta- 
physic. 

Man  is  a  dike  between  Time  and  Eter- 


CODA  219 


nity,  and  he  gleams  with  the  waters  of  both. 
He  is  the  corybantic  apparition.  His  life 
is  a  delirium.  He  is  a  crackbrained  God. 
His  seventy  years  are  an  orgy  of  feeling 
and  thought.  This  shatterpated  upstart 
makes  a  superb  gesture  even  before  the 
gates  of  hell.  The  life  of  the  dullest  of 
beings  is  still  epical.  Genius  is  a  dementia. 
The  winged  hounds  of  Desire  have  sunk 
their  fangs  into  our  souls  and  we  have 
rabies. 

Thus  do  I  see  the  soul  of  Greece,  and  the 
gods  that  pontificated  on  Olympus  are  the 
multi-incarnation  of  that  soul. 

Front  this  lusty  dream  of  man  with  the 
plush  dreams  of  the  theological  dandies  and 
the  nanny-goats  of  morality  of  today.  The 
lightnings  that  are  locked  in  my  veins,  the 
passions  pent  and  tombed  in  my  nethers 
are  sins! 

Power  lies  abed  and  sucks  the  nipple  of 
a  milkless  breast.  Beauty  petitions  at  the 
gate  of  Mammon.  The  envenomed  Christ- 
blood  still  flows  from  those  immedicable 
wounds  that  know  no  healing.  And  we 
who  once  beheld  Aphrodite  shake  the  sea 
from  her  tresses  and  once  were  chum  to 
satyr  and  faun  and  in  another  time  dogged 


220  CODA 


the  footsteps  of  Diana,  we  are  rammed  into 
a  manger  and  cuffed  into  a  charnelhouse 
and  puddle  in  the  sweat  of  fear. 

From  that  transstellar  Olympus  we  are 
come  to  a  carpenter's  table.  From  the 
parley  of  the  gods  we  are  come  to  the 
bickerings  of  Gargantuan  eunuchs.  We 
who  once  wore  the  laurel  wreath  now  wear 
the  mildewed  helmet  of  salvation.  The 
beaker  once  filled  with  ambrosia  is  now  a 
monstrance  from  which  one  may  quaff  an 
apocryphal  Holy  Ghost.  Pegasus  is  be 
come  a  Palm  Sunday  ass.  Jason  is  a  mis 
sionary  who  decoys  the  heathen,  and  his 
golden  fleece  comes  from  the  fleeced.  The 
Bacchic  amphora  graven  with  mystical 
festive  rites  has  become  a  consecrated  bowl 
wherein  Ignorance  dips  its  dirty  finger-tips. 

Christianity  has  amputated  Life  at  the 
navel.  It  has  watered  the  milk  in  the  breast 
of  Aphrodite.  It  has  thrown  the  cowl  of 
asceticism  over  Apollo.  It  has  put  a  crown 
of  thorns  on  Pan. 

But  the  snows  on  Olympus  are  melting, 
and  in  the  veins  of  Time  are  the  seeds  of 
the  old  gods,  who  are  incarnated  again  and 
again  on  the  earth.  Religions  are  passing 
epidemics,  but  Paganism  is  as  immortal  as 


CODA  221 


matter,  as  indestructible  as  sex,  as  eternally 
legitimate  as  sensation. 

Out  of  the  purple  seas  of  the  Coming 
Time  again  rises  the  divine  Aphrodite  be 
fore  my  prophetic  eyes,  and  at  Her  breast 
she  clasps  Eros,  who  is  the  Christ  reborn, 
regenerated,  paganized. 

It  is  the  Second  Advent! 

THE  END. 


TYPOGRAPHY    AND    PRINTING    BY 
THE  ULLMAN  PRESS,  INC.,  N.  Y. 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

LOAN  OEPT. 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


18Sep'57BC 

RETURNED  TO 
^ATR=STAT.  U& 

NOV  1  1    1957 

:'  *                         V/ 

§                 kl 

> 

:         ; 

0 

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&         '* 

EEC.  CIR.  MAR  1  2  1979 

LD  21-100m-6,'56 
(B9311slO)476 


General  Library 

University  of  California 

Berkeley 


